FORMA Therapeutics Announces Collaboration with Novartis to Develop Inhibitors of Protein-Protein Interactions

FORMA eligible to receive over $200 million in potential fees and milestones
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(Business Wire)--
FORMA Therapeutics announced today that it has entered into a license and option
agreement through the Novartis Option Fund. Under the terms of the agreement,
FORMA will leverage its transformative biology and chemistry platform to develop
inhibitors for an undisclosed protein-protein interaction target in the field of
oncology. The agreement includes an upfront fee and potential milestones
totaling over $200 million as well as royalties.

"Protein-protein interactions represent important target opportunities in the
field of oncology drug discovery, but have been highly elusive to date," stated
Reinhard Ambros, Head of the Novartis Venture Funds. "Novartis is very excited
to be collaborating with FORMA to access their biology and chemistry expertise
and powerful discovery tools to unlock this challenging target class."

"Working collaboratively with Novartis on these targets provides us with the
opportunity to fully leverage our integrated drug discovery platform to
accelerate the advancement of oncology programs into clinical development," said
Steven Tregay, CEO of FORMA. "We believe that this collaboration provides
important validation for FORMA`s unique approach to drug discovery for
challenging targets."

About FORMA`s Integrated Drug Discovery Platform

FORMA is uniquely positioned through its unprecedented combination of
technological capabilities and oncology expertise to access such novel target
space and to develop a new generation of breakthrough oncology drugs. Some of
the key features of FORMA`s discovery capabilities include:

• Versatile cell-based screening platform which allows the screening of discrete
targets in cells and quantitative genome/proteome-wide profiling and target
identification.

• Accessing new chemical space through structure guided drug discovery (SGDD)
approaches leveraging proprietary computational and structural biology combined
with our integrated chemistry platform which incorporates Diversity Orientated
Synthesis (DOS). DOS combines the high stereochemical and structural diversity
found in natural products with traditional combinatorial chemistry techniques.
This approach has been proven to work for challenging targets and will allow the
rapid optimization of lead therapeutic candidates.

FORMA Therapeutics is integrating transformative biology and chemistry to unlock
the best targets and pathways that genomics medicine has revealed. FORMA builds
on the vision of its academic founders: Stuart Schreiber, Todd Golub, Michael
Foley, each of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and leverages its
innovative drug discovery platform to address challenging targets and develop a
robust internal pipeline of targeted breakthrough oncology drugs.FORMA is a
global company headquartered in Cambridge, MA with additional research
operations in Connecticut, Singapore and Beijing. www.formatherapeutics.com

The Novartis Option Fund (NOF) is a $200 million fund which is part of the
Novartis Venture Funds (NVF), which were established in 1996 and currently
manage over $550 million in committed capital and is invested in more then 50
private companies. The objective of the $200 million Novartis Option Fund is to
seed innovative companies through financing their initial investment.The
investment is coupled with an option to a specific therapeutic program early
validation for the start-up company`s technology/programs by large Pharma. The
NVF team of nine investment professionals located in Basel, Switzerland and
Cambridge, MA brings together extensive experience in pharmaceutical R&D and
venture capital. For more information, visit www.venturefund.novartis.com

FORMA Therapeutics
Steven Tregay, CEO, 617-679-1970
or
Media Contact:
MacDougall Biomedical Communications
Douglas MacDougall or Kari Watson, 781-235-3060

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