Boehringer Ingelheim has dived deeper into its collaboration with Variant Bio, expanding the deal to cover cardiovascular disease in an agreement potentially worth more than $250 million.
The German pharma giant initially tapped up the genomics-focused biotech in January in a $120 million biobucks deal to harness Variant’s AI-powered Inference platform to discover and validate new targets for cardiorenal and kidney disease. The Seattle-based company touts the platform as a way to integrate genomic, deep phenotyping and multiomic data from studies spanning global populations.
Boehringer is now expanding the collaboration to cover cardiovascular indications.
“Cardiovascular and kidney disease are closely interconnected and collectively represent one of the world's greatest health challenges,” Variant explained in the Sept. 23 release.
Variant said the expanded collaboration will pair its platform and data-driven discovery capabilities with Boehringer’s expertise in cardiovascular and kidney disease to identify potential new treatments for cardiovascular disease.
Søren Tullin, global head of cardiovascular-renal-metabolic diseases research at Boehringer, said the expanded collaboration will “aim to identify genetically supported targets that could open new paths to first-in-class treatments for people living with cardiovascular disease.”
Under the expanded agreement, Variant will receive an additional upfront payment and is eligible for potential license and milestone payments totaling more than $250 million. The companies didn’t offer a more detailed breakdown of the financials.
Boehringer is no stranger to the cardiovascular space, marketing the heart failure and chronic kidney disease (CKD) drug Jardiance, the blood thinner Pradaxa and the hypertension drug Twynsta, among others. The company has also been pairing its aldosterone synthase inhibitor vicadrostat with Jardiance in phase 3 studies in heart failure and CKD.
The expanded deal with Variant comes a day after Boehringer penned a $1 billion biobucks multiyear agreement with AI drug discovery company Envisagenics aimed at validating tumor-specific targets.
Other pharmas have also spied the potential in Variant’s approach. In January 2025, Novo Nordisk inked a multiyear research pact to better understand the genetics underlying metabolic diseases across diverse populations.