Forma Therapeutics could earn up to $700 million under a new discovery, development, and commercialization deal with Janssen Biotech, a Johnson & Johnson company.

Forma has secured $175 million during the past 14 months through a string of drug discovery partnerships with Boehringer Ingelheim, Genentech, Eisai, and now Janssen.

Nevertheless, those partnerships demand less than half the company’s screening capacity says Forma CEO Steven Tregay, who expects the company to run 30 of its own targets through validation this year.

“We’ve turned drug discovery on its ear,” says Tregay. “A lot of big drug companies validate a target with experiments to convince themselves that they have relevance in, for example, a particular cancer. They can spend a lot of time validating those targets and find out in the end that it’s not druggable. We do the reverse.”

Under the terms of the collaboration and license option agreement with Janssen, Forma will discover and develop drugs against a panel of tumor metabolism targets. The company will use its capabilities in computational and medicinal chemistry, parallel synthesis, X-ray crystallography, and relevant studies. It retains an option on North American rights to some of the compounds, something which Tregay says is a key element of the company's value-creation strategy.

The deal’s value could reach $700 million if development, regulatory, and commercialization milestones are achieved, as well as additional project funding for Forma over several years. The companies can also expand the collaboration to include additional targets, including areas beyond tumor metabolism.

Forma’s reliance on partnerships has meant that, so far, it has only had to raise $33 million to advance its own pipeline of cancer therapeutics. The Watertown, Massachusetts-based company is backed by Novartis Option Fund, Bio*One Capital of Singapore, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, and Lilly Ventures.