Pfizer has announced that it is spinning out a new company, SpringWorks Therapeutics, to develop several drugs for rare diseases that the drug giant did not want to move forward internally.

The new firm will be funded with $103 million from Pfizer, Bain Capital Life Sciences, Bain Capital Double Impact, Orbimed and LifeArc.

“We’re left with some compounds that we think have great promise for patients but are not necessarily core,” Freda Lewis-Hall, executive vice president and chief medical officer at Pfizer, said in an interview. “We originally conceived of this as kind of a new and innovative way for us to advance the investigational therapies that we thought hold significant promise for underserved populations.”

Over the past decade, many Pfizer drugs have found success outside the company: such as the breast cancer drug Nerlynx, originally a Pfizer compound, Esperion, Actavis

SpringWorks founder and president Lara Sullivan and Lewis-Hall saw some compounds in the company’s portfolio that showed promise in rare diseases or for underserved patient populations and thought “a more partnered development paradigm and channel would be optimal to help those compounds go forward more quickly,” Sullivan said in an interview. Springworks is starting out with four compounds licensed from Pfizer, half of them poised for phase 3 trials.

Source: Forbes