Copenhagen-based Orbis Medicines has entered a multi-target drug discovery collaboration and license agreement with Novo Nordisk (NYSE: NVO) worth up to USD 1.4 billion in upfront and milestone payments plus tiered royalties, with Novo also making a strategic equity investment in the privately held company. The deal gives Novo access to Orbis's nGen platform — an AI-enabled macrocycle discovery engine — to generate oral drug candidates against multiple undisclosed cardiometabolic targets.
Macrocycles occupy a middle ground between conventional small molecules and biologics, offering larger binding surfaces for difficult targets while retaining the potential for oral bioavailability. The collaboration is a discovery-stage arrangement in which Orbis will use its nGen platform to design, synthesize, and screen synthetic macrocycles, described by the company as nCycles, optimized for oral bioavailability and membrane permeability. The platform integrates generative AI with high-throughput synthesis capabilities, continuously trained on experimental macrocycle datasets generated in real time.
The agreement extends Novo’s push to develop orally administered cardiometabolic medicines beyond conventional small molecules and injectable biologics. Orbis is developing synthetic macrocycles intended to combine the target-binding capabilities of larger biologic drugs with oral bioavailability, with its nCycles designed to access both extracellular and intracellular targets. Novo separately partnered with Vivtex in February 2026 in a deal worth up to USD 2.1 billion to develop oral peptide and protein therapies for obesity and diabetes, highlighting its broader investment in technologies aimed at replacing or complementing injectable treatments.