On January 9, 2023, Voyager Therapeutics announced that it entered into a strategic collaboration agreement with Neurocrine Biosciences to advance multiple gene therapies for the treatment of neurological diseases. The collaboration, which builds upon the long-standing strategic partnership between Voyager and Neurocrine, includes Voyager’s GBA1 gene therapy program for Parkinson’s disease and other GBA1-mediated diseases and three new gene therapy programs directed to rare CNS targets, in each case leveraging novel capsids from Voyager’s TRACER^™ platform.

Under the terms of the agreement, Voyager will receive up-front consideration of $175 million, including a $39 million equity investment, and may also be eligible to receive up to $1.5 billion in potential development milestone payments, plus additional potential commercial milestone payments and tiered royalties on net sales. Neurocrine has agreed to fund the development program. For the GBA1 gene therapy program, Voyager may, at its option after the data read out from completion of the first Phase 1 clinical trial, elect to co-develop and co-commercialize the program under a 50/50 cost and profit-sharing arrangement in lieu of receiving further milestone-based payments and royalties for the program.

The WilmerHale team advising Voyager on the collaboration agreement included Sarah Hogan, Jenna Ventorino, Elese Hanson, Elizabeth Mayo and Drew Fosque. Brian Johnson, Avery Reaves, Sarah Matchett and Frank Wang advised on the equity investment and related arrangements, with Fred Adam advising on tax matters and Hartmut Schneider, Oliver Fleischmann and Carla Gilbertson advising on antitrust and competition matters.