Germany’s Boehringer Ingelheim has signed a research pact with the Lead Discovery Center to try and find new drugs that can treat the underlying causes of schizophrenia.
The Dortmund, Germany-based Lead Discovery Center (LDC), Max Planck Innovation GmbH and Boehringer have all signed an agreement that allows the German drugmaker an option to receive the exclusive rights to a new lead compound for the treatment of schizophrenia, which is set to be discovered and developed at the LDC.
The deal revolves around new, early-stage research results (which have not been shared in the release) from Professor Moritz Rossner and his team at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine in Göttingen. The LDC was established in 2008 by the technology transfer organization Max Planck Innovation.
Rossner will work closely together with the LDC team to identify and optimize new compounds with a strong therapeutic potential and develop them further to the stage of a validated pharmaceutical lead with in vivo efficacy.
In this early discovery project, Boehringer will take a seat on the project development team and will pay an option fee.
In addition, the company will allocate internal resources to the program and support collaborating partners to beef up the early development work. Once the project has attained proof-of-concept in relevant in vivo models, Boehringer can exclusively license the lead at predefined terms for subsequent preclinical and clinical development.
Any revenue the LDC may receive from commercialization will be shared with the academic inventors and collaborating institutions. Financial details have not been disclosed.
“Schizophrenia is an incredibly complex disorder which dramatically changes the life of the individual affected,” said Rossner.
“We believe our approach holds strong potential to improve the treatment options for patients, and this collaboration with the LDC and Boehringer Ingelheim is a great opportunity to advance it from our laboratory into pharmaceutical development.”
There are already many anti-psychotic meds on the market with generics now also available--but Boehringer said it wants to go beyond treating the symptoms of the disorder and get to the heart of the underlying causative mechanisms of schizophrenia, and potentially carve out a new market.
This will be something of a departure from the privately owned drugmaker’s portfolio, which in recent years has focused more on oncology, as well treatments in respiratory disorders and diabetes. It has also sometimes been guilty of focusing too much on its social media and digital output, than its R&D offerings.
It has however in recent years started to build up a CNS pipeline, which includes a $262 million deal made back in January on a discovery-stage project with the struggling Arena Pharmaceuticals ($ARNA), which though short on details, will likely focus on mental illness.
These deals are in fact reflective of a company-wide embrace of external R&D over the past few years, as the drugmaker has been gradually decentralizing its research operation and relying more and more on partnerships to build out its pipeline.
Last year, Boehringer disclosed plans to spend €11 billion on R&D over the next 5 years, which works out to 17% less per year than what it spent in 2014. But the company has promised to get more from less, touting an expanded reliance on academic and biotech partners that the company believes will lead to more efficient drug development.
The LDC has a “preferred partnership” with the Max Planck Society and has formed alliances with many Big Pharma players, including AstraZeneca ($AZN), Bayer, Merck KGaA, Daiichi Sankyo, Johnson & Johnson Innovation ($JNJ), and Roche ($RHHBY).
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