Under the terms of the collaboration, HAYA will receive an upfront payment, including an equity investment, and is eligible to receive up to an aggregate $1 billion in pre-clinical, clinical and commercial milestone payments, as well as royalties on product sales.
HAYA’s proprietary regulatory genome discovery platform enables the identification of tissue-, disease- and cell-specific long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) targets and the development of RNA-targeting therapies, with potentially better efficacy and less toxicity than current treatments, to reprogram disease-driving cell states. This collaboration will utilize HAYA’s full-stack regulatory genome platform to identify, characterize and validate multiple novel lncRNA targets for the potential development of new treatments for obesity and related metabolic disorders.
"This partnership with Lilly demonstrates the significant advances we have made with our revolutionary regulatory genome RNA-guided platform and validates the potential of targeting lncRNA for chronic conditions," said Samir Ounzain, CEO, HAYA Therapeutics. "We look forward to working closely with Lilly, an established leader in developing treatments for metabolic diseases, to help bring patients novel disease-modifying therapeutics that could offer greater efficacy, safety and accessibility than currently available treatments."
HAYA Therapeutics is a precision medicines company developing programmable therapeutics targeting regulatory RNAs derived from the dark genome, a cell information processing unit, to reprogram pathological cell states for a broad range of diseases, including cardiovascular and metabolic diseases and cancer. The company is using its innovative platform to gain novel insights into the biology of disease cell states and the long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) that regulate them. HAYA’s lead therapeutic candidate is HTX-001, in development for the treatment of heart failure. HAYA is also developing a pipeline of lncRNA-targeting precision therapies for the cell-specific treatment of diseases in other tissues.
Headquartered at the life sciences park Biopôle in Lausanne, with laboratory facilities at JLABS @ San Diego, HAYA is currently enrolled in Innouisse Core Coaching program.
(Press release)
The new Swiss Venture Capital Report was published on 26 January. It analyses 304 financing rounds closed in 2020 and includes further article such as an interview with Michael Hengartner, President of the ETH Board, and a list of Swiss "soonicorns". 
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