Pharmaceutical company AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) and ADARx Pharmaceuticals, a late clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation RNA therapeutics, announced on Wednesday a collaboration and licence option agreement to develop small interfering RNA (siRNA) therapeutics across multiple disease areas, including neuroscience, immunology and oncology.

The strategic collaboration is intended to leverage ADARx's RNA discovery expertise and proprietary siRNA technology, which has the potential to enable sustained and precise mRNA silencing. AbbVie says that it will contribute its expertise in antibody engineering, antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) and tissue delivery approaches as appropriate, to augment ADARx's discovery efforts.

Under the terms of the agreement, ADARx will receive an upfront payment of USD335m and will be eligible to receive several billion dollars in additional contingent payments including option-related fees and milestone payments, as well as tiered royalties.

"This collaboration with AbbVie further validates the differentiated RNA technology that we have developed at ADARx and has the potential to unlock tremendous clinical and commercial potential across multiple disease areas," said Zhen Li, Ph.D., ADARx co-founder, president and CEO. "AbbVie's research and development expertise combined with its global commercial reach make them the ideal strategic collaborator to accelerate these programmes for the potential benefit of patients worldwide.

"In addition to this strategic collaboration with AbbVie, ADARx continues to advance a deep pipeline of wholly-owned clinical-stage programmes that span complement-mediated, cardiovascular and thrombotic diseases and various preclinical discovery programmes including in obesity and neurodegeneration."