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A local company born of medical research conducted at the University of Calgary has signed a C$1-billion deal to develop and commercialize revolutionary new drugs for autoimmune disease.

Calgary-based Parvus Therapeutics, founded by Dr. Pere Santamaria — a professor in the department of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the Cumming School of Medicine — has entered into a worldwide collaboration and licence agreement with Genentech, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company that specializes in the discovery, development and commercialization of new medicines.

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The partnership will see the two companies work together to develop and commercialize drugs for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), autoimmune liver diseases (ALD), and celiac disease, using technology first discovered by Santamaria in 2004 during the course of his research at the U of C. The technology harnesses a natural mechanism in the body to shut off the immune attack that is characteristic of a variety of autoimmune diseases — everything from Type 1 diabetes to multiple sclerosis to rheumatoid arthritis — without compromising the rest of the immune system.