7 Ways Teva is Collaborating to Innovate

8 Minutes
February 28, 2024
- Innovation
- Patient Focus

Focusing on growth potential, Teva will continue to develop new collaborations with selected partners to expand reach and promote innovation. Already known around the world for its strong generics offering, as a company with a category-defying portfolio, Teva is harnessing its generics expertise and stepping up production of innovative medicines and biosimilars.

Read on to discover 7 new and exciting collaborations that are currently underway to better serve patients and health communities. Because at Teva, we are all in for better health.

Accelerating research into treatments for schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a chronic, progressive and severely debilitating mental disorder that affects thinking, feeling and actions. Patients experience an array of symptoms, which may include delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech or behavior and impaired cognitive ability. Approximately 24 million people, or one in 300 (0.32%), worldwide are affected by the disorder, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and about 1% of the world’s population will develop schizophrenia in their lifetime.

Teva is collaborating with Royalty Pharma, a leading provider of funding solutions for global life sciences innovation, to further accelerate the clinical research program for a new long-acting injectable treatment for schizophrenia. Teva will receive funding support of up to $125 million for the development of the investigational treatment, currently in Phase 3.

"We are delighted to partner with Teva and support them as their innovative pipeline continues to come to fruition,” said Pablo Legorreta, founder and CEO of Royalty Pharma. If approved by health authorities, this could be an important new treatment option for patients with schizophrenia.

Collaborating to deliver therapies for Inflammatory Bowel Disease

In partnership with global healthcare company Sanofi, Teva is developing a therapy to treat ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, two types of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). The collaboration will leverage the innovative R&D and commercial expertise of both companies, including Sanofi’s proven leadership and success in the immunology and gastroenterology space and Teva’s capabilities to optimize development and global launches. The treatment is currently in phase 2b clinical trials.

IBD is a broad term that describes conditions characterized by chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Prolonged inflammation results in damage to this tract. The two most common IBDs are Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. According to the European Federation of Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis Association, (EFCCA), an estimated 7 million people worldwide live with IBD and its prevalence is increasing in western countries, with a high burden of IBD in North America, Australia, New Zealand and Europe, as well as in newly industrialized countries in Africa, Asia and South America.

Paul Hudson, Chief Executive Officer, Sanofi says: “We believe this could emerge as an important option for people living with serious gastrointestinal diseases. This collaboration strengthens our commitment to advancing innovative treatment options for inflammatory conditions with a high unmet need and bolsters our goal to be an industry leader in immunology.”

Finding new ways of treating rheumatoid arthritis and IBD

Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic disease that causes inflammation around the body and common symptoms include chronic pain, stiffness, tenderness, heat and swelling in the joints. Untreated it can cause severe damage to the joints and surrounding tissue and can lead to heart, lung or nervous system problems. According to the WHO, 18 million people worldwide were living with rheumatoid arthritis in 2019, with women two-to-three times more often affected than men.

Teva is working with Alvotech, a global biotech company specializing in the development and manufacture of biosimilar medicines for patients worldwide, to deliver biosimilar treatments to patients who live with rheumatoid arthritis and other chronic medical conditions.

“We remain focused on preparing for a successful pre-approval inspection and resolving any outstanding issues identified by the FDA to be able to bring our biosimilar candidates to patients in the US with Teva as soon as possible, says Robert Wessman, Chairman and CEO of Alvotech.”

Transforming the treatment of atopic dermatitis and asthma

Together with biotechnology company Biolojic Design, Teva has announced an exclusive license agreement for the development of a novel antibody-based therapy for the treatment of inflammatory diseases such as atopic dermatitis and asthma. The innovative antibody is thought to block two drivers of inflammation, while existing drugs currently approved by health authorities focus on only one of these two drivers.

Atopic dermatitis is one of the most common forms of eczema, a condition that causes the skin to become itchy, dry and cracked. The International Eczema Council says that about 223 million people worldwide were living with this condition in 2022.

The WHO says asthma affected an estimated 262 million people in 2019 and caused 455,000 deaths, while studies show that asthma rates have been surging around the globe over the past three decades, often attributed to pollution, climate change and global warming.

Biolojic Design uses computational biology and artificial intelligence to transform antibodies into medicinal solutions through AI and computational design. "We are excited about the opportunity to work with Teva and help bring hope to patients,” says CEO and founder Yanay Ofran. “The potential therapy we designed for atopic dermatitis and asthma is another example of how AI can support drug development.”

Revolutionizing healthcare partnerships with AION Labs

Teva is a founding member of AION Labs, a consortium that unites pharmacy giants Teva, AstraZeneca, Merck and Pfizer, backed by venture capital firm Israel Biotech Fund, strategic partners Amazon Web Services, Amiti Ventures and German independent research institute BioMed X, with the support of the Israeli government through the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA).

AION Labs works with global pharma and technology leaders to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data to accelerate the discovery of new drugs and develop them in a faster, more efficient and more precise manner with lower failure rates, explains AION Labs CEO, Mati Gill.

AION alliance partners including Teva have identified key challenges facing the healthcare sector and launch them into the scientific and technology communities to help find solutions. The individuals who propose the most innovative and potentially effective solutions are invited to AION Labs, then organized into teams where they work alongside mentors from alliance partners. At the conclusion, each team presents its project and the winning team leader is invited to form a start-up company funded by AION Labs for the first two years. They work to develop the solution for market launch with the possibility of additional funding made available for two more years if warranted.

“AION Labs has created a unique situation that is very special”, says Dr Kashif Sadiq, founder and CEO of DenovAI Biotech, one of the consortium’s first startups. “It’s saying here are all the gaps and we’re going to create companies to address those gaps. And the synergy potential for all those companies is also amazing.”

Joining forces with academia to build cross-sector and multidisciplinary collaborations

In the academic partnerships space, Teva has developed many collaborations with leading labs around the globe. In the last three years, following extensive mapping of the Israeli ecosystem, Teva established over 30 collaborations in Israel as part of its Israeli Academic engagement initiative.

The main goal of these collaborations is to find new targets, technologies and therapeutics for Teva's future pipeline. In addition to researching strategic collaborations, Teva also established a National Forum for BioInnovators, a forum for top PhDs and post-doctoral students that aims to bridge the gap between academia and industry and train future biotech leaders.It brings together PhD and post-doc students working in immunology and neuroscience with Teva, the biotech industry and business community. For the last three years, the program has worked with participants from Tel Aviv University, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University, Bar Ilan University and the Weizmann Institute of Science, and its growing community currently includes over 120 students from around Israel.

Collaborating to identify personalized treatment approaches using unique biomarkers

Teva is conducting early research with MetaSight Diagnostics, a health technology company developing liquid biopsy diagnostics, for early detection of chronic and acute diseases. The project aims to identify biomarkers for patient response to Teva treatments in early-stage development.

"Our work with MetaSight is an example of how Teva is stepping up innovation as part of the company’s Pivot to Growth strategy and applying cutting-edge technologies and unique collaborations to accelerate growth of our innovative pipeline,” said Eric A. Hughes, MD, PhD, Head of Global R&D and Chief Medical Officer of Teva. “We chose MetaSight for its deep analytical capabilities and powerful multi-omics platform linked with comprehensive electronic health records data. Our hope is that this patient-focused approach will lead to better understanding of target diseases that could lead to more personalized treatment approaches for patients.”

Multi-omics provides an integrated approach to discovery across multiple levels of biology. Alongside its deidentified electronic health records and machine learning capabilities, MetaSight analyzes thousands of patients in its proprietary datasets to enhance biomarker identification and support development of population cohorts mimicking real-world clinical settings.

“Our work with Teva is a prime example of how our proprietary and versatile platform can effectively identify a variety of novel biomarkers to accelerate research and development in pharmaceutical companies’ priority disease areas,” said MetaSight Founder and CEO, Professor Tomer Shlomi. Together we are helping to identify potential new drug treatments for some of the most intractable chronic diseases, potentially improving health for millions of people.

Working to change lives

The aim of these collaborations, explains Dr Eric Hughes, Teva’s Head of Global R&D and Chief Medical Officer, “is to bring the world new innovative medicines that can improve lives all over the world”. Richard Francis, President and CEO of Teva, adds: “It’s an opportunity to truly transform the practice of medicine and change people's lives for the better."