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BMS SIGNS TWO COLLABORATION AGREEMENTS

December 14, 2005

Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) recently inked a pair of collaboration agreements -- one focused on developing novel cardiovascular disease treatments and the other on domain antibody products.

BMS announced recently that it is partnering with Exelixis to discover, develop and commercialize novel therapies targeted against the Liver X Receptor (LXR), a nuclear hormone receptor implicated in a variety of cardiovascular and metabolic disorders. Under the terms of the deal, the companies will jointly identify drug candidates that are ready for investigational new drug application-enabling studies, and BMS will undertake further preclinical development and be responsible for clinical development, regulatory, manufacturing, and sales and marketing activities for such compounds.

Terms of the agreement include an upfront payment from BMS of $17.5 million to Exelixis and will provide research and development funding of approximately $10 million per year for an initial period of two years. Exelixis also may receive pre-specified development and regulatory milestone payments totaling approximately $140 million per product for up to two products from the collaboration, as well as sales milestones and royalties on sales of products commercialized under the collaboration.

BMS has also signed a development agreement with UK-based biotechnology firm Domantis to develop human domain antibody (dAb) therapeutics for uses in the fields of immunology and oncology. The firms will work to discover a range of novel dAbs to address therapeutic targets involved in T-cell co-stimulation (part of the human immune response), some of which may not be amenable to targeting with conventional antibody approaches.