Carna Biosciences has signed a worldwide licensing agreement with Janssen Biotech Inc., one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical companies of Johnson & Johnson, to further develop and commercialize compounds from one of Carna Bioscience's small molecule protein kinase inhibitor programs.

Under the terms of the agreement, facilitated by Johnson & Johnson Innovation, California and Asia Pacific, Carna Biosciences will receive an initial upfront payment and is eligible to receive additional milestone payments upon achievement of certain developmental, regulatory, and commercial milestones. Carna Biosciences will also be eligible to receive tiered royalties on the net sales of commercialized licensed products.

Carna Biosciences is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of kinase inhibitor drugs to treat serious unmet medical needs in oncology, autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, and neurological diseases by inhibiting kinases that are important drivers for those diseases. Carna Biosciences was founded in Kobe, Japan, in 2003 as a spinoff of Japan Organon (Nippon Organon KK).

"We are pleased to collaborate with Janssen to further develop one of our kinase inhibitor programs. Our hope is that our discovery efforts will someday make a meaningful difference in the lives of people living with immunologic disease," said Kohichiro Yoshino, PhD, Founder, President and CEO of Carna Biosciences. "This agreement with Janssen is an important first step towards the goal of discovering and developing significant therapeutic solutions for improving human health. Carna Biosciences will continue to identify and develop innovative compounds with strong potential as therapeutic kinase inhibitors. This agreement further empowers our team to passionately work towards developing and delivering superior drug discovery tools and therapeutic medicines for years to come."

Since its founding in 2003, Carna has built a powerful kinase drug discovery engine that has led to its current, rich pipeline of drug candidates in the preclinical stage. Carna has also established a vast collection of compound libraries consisting of kinase-focused and diverse molecules to maximize the success rate of screening. Carna's drug discovery efforts are supported by Carna's internally developed, proprietary profiling and screening technology, QuickScout, and by several other in-house drug discovery tools.

The company claims that QuickScout is one of the world's largest biochemical kinase assay panels and it enables the efficient development of small molecule inhibitors with potentially superior safety and efficacy profiles by providing valuable and comprehensive selectivity information.

"This agreement further empowers our team to passionately work towards developing and delivering superior drug discovery tools and therapeutic medicines for years to come," added Akiko Futamura, PhD, President and CEO of CarnaBio USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Carna Biosciences.