Roche scooped up two novel RNA-targeted programs for Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease from Ionis Pharmaceuticals, the companies announced Wednesday morning.

As part of the agreement, Roche is paying Ionis $60 million upfront for the worldwide exclusive rights to the treatments. Ionis will also be eligible to receive developmental, regulatory and commercial milestone payments as well as tiered royalties.

Roche will also be responsible for the clinical development, manufacturing and commercialization of the drugs if they receive regulatory approval.

This marks an expansion of the existing partnership between Ionis and Roche, which have collaborated over the past decade on a variety of treatments, beginning with tominersen, an investigational medicine for Huntington’s disease.

Currently, tominersen is being evaluated by Roche in a Phase 2 proof of concept study assessing its safety, biomarker and efficacy trends in people with early manifest or prodromal Huntington’s disease.

“Our lasting partnership with Ionis, a leader in RNA-targeted therapeutics, is a great example of two collaborators mutually benefiting from their relationship by complementing and learning from each other,” said James Sabry, Ph.D., global head of Roche Pharma partnering, in a statement. “By expanding our alliance, we bring together the companies’ combined knowledge of the science in Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease with Roche’s proven capabilities in the development and commercialization of innovative treatments in neuroscience.”     

The agreement also indicates that the Alzheimer’s research market shows no sign of slowing down, following the Food and Drug Administration traditional approval of Eisai and Biogen’s Leqembi in July and promising data released by Eli Lilly for its treatment, donanemab.

For Ionis, the Roche agreement comes one day after the company announced that its rare disease therapy olezarsen reached its main goal in a Phase 3 trial for familial chylomicronemia syndrome. The company said it expects to submit regulatory filings in the U.S. and E.U. early next year to receive marketing authorization for the drug.

Ionis has been excelling as of late, posting $188 million in quarterly revenues, according to its latest earnings report released in August. Ionis said the 40% year-over-year rise in revenue was in part due to “significant partner payments,” including $51 million in milestone payments and $20 million in license fees.