BMS in $1 billion-plus cancer deal with Volastra

Volastra Therapeutics, a US biotech firm focused on exploiting chromosomal instability (CIN) as a vulnerability for cancer cells, has signed a collaboration with US pharm major Bristol Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) to discover, develop and commercialize new medicines.

The multi-year collaboration will leverage Volastra’s proprietary CINtech platform, to identify CIN-related, synthetic lethal targets as drug candidates. Synthetic lethality is a well-established genetic approach of target discovery that involves exploiting vulnerabilities in tumor cells to induce tumor cell death while sparing normal cells. In pre-clinical models, Volastra has demonstrated that synthetical lethal approaches can be particularly effective in tumors with high levels of CIN.