Bayer still waiting on Vividion

Since Bayer paid $1.5bn to acquire the US biotech Vividion in 2021 it hasn't had a great deal to shout about this, one of its boldest moves in drug development, but it will hope that it's only a matter of time before Vividion delivers: on Thursday the subsidiary took its fourth project into human trials. The study, testing VVD-159642 in RAS, EGFR or HER2 overexpressing solid tumours, was disclosed by OncologyPipeline and ApexOnco in February, and it's now dosed its first patient, Vividion has announced. $1.5bn was a huge sum to pay for what was at the time a preclinical biotech, and back in 2021 all that was really known about Vividion was that it had licensed a preclinical Werner helicase inhibitor to Roche for $135m up front, and had an early in-house project targeting NRF2-driven cancers. Still, through Vividion Bayer gained a drug discovery business, and subsequent disclosures have revealed work on fairly novel targets; VVD-159642 is a blocker of RAS and PI3Kα, a similar approach to BridgeBio's PI3Kα:RAS breaker BBO-10203. That said, no Vividion project has yet generated clinical data, even though the KEAP1 activator VVD-130037 started phase 1 some 18 months ago.

Vividion’s clinical-stage assets

Source: OncologyPipeline.