Novartis has also made an undisclosed equity investment in Canada-based Parvus.
Under the terms, Novartis will develop and market products made from the Navacim technology besides taking responsibility of its clinical-stage development and commercialization efforts.
Parvus CEO Janice M LeCocq said: “This is a transformative collaboration for Parvus. We are excited by this strong endorsement of the science behind our Navacim platform, as well as the opportunity to collaborate closely with a globally recognized leader in the field of immunology and autoimmune disease.
"This will augment our resources across the Navacim platform and accelerate the development of our T1D program.
“We are also pursuing the development of multiple Navacims that target autoimmune diseases where there is high unmet need for disease-modifying drugs without causing systemic immunosuppression.”
Parvus, which has secured an upfront payment for the rights, will handle the existing preclinical activities for the T1D program. It will file the Investigational New Drug (IND) jointly with Novartis through a jointly formed steering committee.
The Canadian pharma will also get funding for its research that will back the preclinical activities of Navacim.
Further, it will be entitled to receive development, regulatory and sales milestone payments. Along with them, it will get product royalties from the Swiss pharma giant, Novartis.
According to Parvus, Navacims comprise nanoparticles (NPs) coated with disease-relevant peptide-major histocompatibility complexes (pMHCs) that modify the behavior of T lymphocytes which are known to cause the disease.
They are claimed by Parvus to have the ability to specifically treat the autoimmune disease without increasing the risk of infection.