Silence Therapeutics settles with Quark Pharmaceuticals

Silence Therapeutics and Quark Pharmaceuticals have settled in the arbitration regarding a milestone payment, as Silence is to receive a $1M cash payment.

Silence on Tuesday said that, under the terms of the agreement, Silence could also either get about 2% royalties from Quark plus milestones, or 15% of the clinical, regulatory and commercial milestone payments and royalties received by Quark from its partner Novartis.

Quark’s QPI-1002 clinical candidate, which uses Silence’s AtuRNAi chemical modification technology, is currently in a Phase 3 trial in Delayed Graft Function (DGF) as well as in a Phase 2 study in Acute Kidney Injury (AKI). Silence says that upon completion of these studies, almost 1,000 patients will have been treated in studies involving QPI-1002.

Ali Mortazavi, Chief Executive Officer of Silence Therapeutics, said: “We are pleased to resolve this matter and now look forward to the efficacy readouts in these indications of high unmet need. As we have indicated before, the RNA stabilisation chemistry being used in QPI-1002 is a critical component of any RNA medicine and we believe that other clinical programmes will also require licenses to our technology that is protected by Silence’s intellectual property.”

We have sent an email to Quark to ask for comments.

If we get reply, we will update this article.