=Pfizer (PFE) spins off new firm SpringWorks for some rare disease drugs

• Pfizer to license four of its experimental medicines to start-up SpringWorks

Pfizer has backed a new drug development company with the task of shepherding four of its experimental medicines through clinical trials, in an unusual deal designed to prevent promising products from languishing on its laboratory shelves.

SpringWorks launched on Monday after securing $103m of funds from investors including Bain Capital, the private equity group, Orbimed, the biotech investor, and Pfizer, which has taken a minority stake in the group.

Freda Lewis-Hall, Pfizer’s chief medical officer, said the pharmaceutical group conceived of the new company as a way of ensuring medicines do not end up being shelved, a common problem at large drugmakers that often unearth more molecules than they want to develop.

“If you think about today’s rapid pace of scientific breakthroughs, we simply have more leads than we can follow,” she said. “These compounds are exciting, but no one can do it all by themselves.”

The phenomenon whereby big pharma torpedoes encouraging drugs has long bedevilled the industry. In recent weeks GlaxoSmithKline, Lilly, AstraZeneca and Teva Pharmaceuticals have announced they are abandoning some programmes to sharpen their focus on core areas.

Pfizer is licensing four of its medicines to SpringWorks, including two that are ready to enter the final “Phase 3” round of clinical trials.

The two late-stage medicines are for rare types of non-cancerous growths known as desmoid tumour and neurofibromatosis, respectively. The earlier drugs target post-traumatic stress disorder and a type of anaemia.

Unusually, Pfizer is licensing the four drugs to SpringWorks without receiving an upfront payment, although it will earn undisclosed fees if the medicines end up succeeding in clinical trials, as well as royalties if they go on sale.

If the model is successful then Pfizer could hand over more of its drugs to SpringWorks, Dr Lewis-Hall said, while the new company will also offer to develop medicines discovered by other pharma groups and academic institutions.

SpringWorks will be led by executive chairman Dan Lynch, who has held various executive jobs at a string of biotechs, and Lara Sullivan, who is leaving her role at Pfizer to become president of the new group.

SoftBank recently led a $1.1bn fundraising in Roivant Sciences to help fund the company’s strategy of “developing promising drugs that get stuck in an industry log jam that has nothing to do with science”.

Axovant, a publicly listed offshoot of Roivant, is poised to announce results from a late-stage clinical trial of an Alzheimer’s medicine that it licensed from GSK, which had discarded the drug after a series of lacklustre studies.