Nxera Pharma to Receive $4.6 Million in Milestone Payments from Centessa Pharmaceuticals

Tokyo, Japan and Cambridge, UK, 30 May 2024 – Nxera Pharma (“the Company” or “Nxera”; TSE: 4565) today announced that it expects to receive $4.6 million in milestone payments from Centessa Pharmaceuticals pursuant to a license agreement regarding Nxera technology used to help design Centessa’s novel orexin receptor 2 (OX2R) agonist, ORX750. The milestone was achieved with clearance of the ORX750 Investigational New Drug application and progression of ORX750 into a Phase 1 clinical trial.

ORX750 is an investigational, orally administered, highly potent and selective OX2R agonist designed to directly target the underlying pathophysiology of orexin neuron loss in narcolepsy type 1 (NT1), with potential applicability to narcolepsy type 2 (NT2), idiopathic hypersomnia, and other sleep-wake disorders with normal orexin levels.

About Nxera Pharma

Nxera Pharma (formerly Sosei Heptares) is a technology powered biopharma company, in pursuit of new specialty medicines to improve the lives of patients with unmet needs in Japan and globally.

In addition to several products being commercialized in Japan, we are advancing an extensive pipeline of over 30 active programs from discovery through to late clinical stage internally and in partnership with leading pharma and biotech companies. This pipeline is focused on addressing major unmet needs in some of the fastest-growing areas of medicine across neurology, GI and immunology, metabolic disorders and rare diseases, and leverages the power of our unique and industry leading GPCR-targeted structure-based drug discovery NxWave™ platform to provide a sustainable source of best- or first-in-class candidates.

Nxera employs over 350 talented people at key locations in Tokyo and Osaka (Japan), London and Cambridge (UK), Basel (Switzerland) and Seoul (South Korea) and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (ticker: 4565).