Silence Therapeutics receives remaining $40m from AstraZeneca partnership

Silence Therapeutics announced receipt of the remaining $40m (£28.24m) from AstraZeneca on Tuesday, due as part of AstraZeneca's $80m cash and equity investment for the siRNA collaboration announced in March 2020.

The AIM-traded firm said the $40m was included in Silence's reported £97.5m pro forma cash balance at the end of the 2020 financial year.

It said the two companies had also started work on two undisclosed targets, and were on track to begin work on five targets within the first three years of the collaboration.

The collaboration was focused on leveraging Silence's proprietary ‘mRNAi GOLD’ platform to discover and develop siRNA therapeutics for cardiovascular, renal, metabolic and respiratory diseases.

“We've made significant progress in our collaboration with AstraZeneca over the past year and are well positioned to initiate work on five disease targets within the first three years,” said Silence Therapeutics president and chief executive officer Mark Rothera.

“This underscores our firm commitment to rapidly advance our pipeline through both our wholly owned programs and partnership programs.”

Under the collaboration, AstraZeneca will pay Silence an option fee of $10m for each selected target at the point of candidate nomination.

For each target selected, Silence would be eligible to receive up to $140m in development milestones and up to $250m in commercialisation milestones, as well as tiered royalties on net sales.

Silence would be responsible for the discovery stage up to the point of candidate nomination, at which point AstraZeneca would take over responsibility and costs for further development.

The company said it would retain responsibility for manufacturing of material to support ‘Good Laboratory Practice’ (GLP) toxicology studies and phase 1 clinical studies, with costs for that manufacture to be covered by AstraZeneca.

Silence also had the option to negotiate for the co-development of two selected programmes of its choice, starting from phase 2.

“We continue to see great promise in Silence's established siRNA platform to develop novel medicines across our key therapy areas in cardiovascular, renal, metabolic and respiratory diseases,” said AstraZeneca’s Regina Fritsche Danielson.

“We look forward to our continued partnership and advancing our discovery efforts to address unmet medical needs.”

At 1210 BST, shares in Silence Therapeutics were flat at 649p.