Boston and Belgium-based Orionis Biosciences and Novartis have expanded a strategic research collaboration that began in 2020, signing a new multi-year agreement to discover and develop molecular glue medicines across multiple disease areas. Orionis will receive USD 40 million upfront and is eligible for up to USD 1.4 billion in development and commercial milestones, plus tiered royalties on any resulting products. Unlike traditional licensing deals centered on a single clinical asset, the agreement gives Novartis access to a discovery platform capable of generating multiple drug candidates across different targets and disease areas.
The collaboration centers on Orionis’s Allo-Glue small molecule platform and its AI-driven discovery engine, which together enable systematic target and ligase profiling, molecular glue candidate identification, and compound optimization. Orionis’s approach differs from many targeted protein degradation companies by focusing on the discovery of novel target-ligase interactions and broader induced-proximity mechanisms beyond protein degradation alone, including protein stabilization and functional modulation. Orionis has described recent advances in robotic automation and AI as having accelerated the prioritization of productive target-ligase pairs, a historically rate-limiting step in molecular glue discovery. No specific programs, targets, or disease indications have been disclosed as part of this collaboration.
This agreement expands a collaboration first established in March 2020, when Novartis partnered with Orionis to apply the company’s induced-proximity drug discovery technologies against challenging targets in oncology and other disease areas. The original alliance was one of Orionis’s first major pharmaceutical partnerships and helped validate its approach to systematically discovering molecular glues and other proximity-based therapeutics.
Molecular glues have emerged as one of the most active areas in targeted protein degradation and induced-proximity drug discovery because they can potentially address disease-driving proteins that have proven difficult to target with conventional small molecules. Novartis has been an active acquirer of molecular glue assets more broadly: in October 2024, the Swiss giant entered a global exclusive license with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Monte Rosa Therapeutics (Nasdaq: MRTO) covering VAV1-directed molecular glue degraders for immune-mediated diseases. Orionis itself has licensed the Allo-Glue platform to Genentech in two separate transactions, the most recent of which, signed in May 2025, carried a USD 105 million upfront payment and up to USD 2 billion in potential milestones.
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