Increasingly acquisitive Charles River Laboratories ($CRL) has signed a new pact with the Milner Therapeutics Institute and Consortium (MTIC) that will see it become the first CRO to gain deeper ties with U.K. life science research centers through this consortium.
Wilmington, MA-based Charles River Laboratories will dig into MTIC’s ties with academic scientists and institutions in its life science R&D hub in Cambridge, U.K. This service reaches out to the pharma industry to help them develop new meds.
The consortium, which went live just last year, is currently made up of Astex, AstraZeneca ($AZN), GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK), and Shionogi, along with three academic centers: the University of Cambridge, the Babraham Institute, and the Sanger Institute.
“Our partnership with the Milner Therapeutics Institute and Consortium further enables the collaboration between academics and pharmaceutical companies as they partner to investigate the therapeutic potential of their research,” said Emily Hickey, corporate SVP, global discovery services at Charles River.
“Charles River has had great success partnering with academic consortia in the United States, and we look forward to the same success in our first major research collaboration in the United Kingdom.”
Under the terms of the deal, financial details of which have not been shared, the academic organizations in the Consortium will be able to get in on Charles River’s early discovery and drug development resources and services.
This, Charles River said in a statement, will help them to speed up their early-stage drug development processes.
“We are excited to welcome Charles River as the newest partner to the Milner Therapeutics Institute,” said Tony Kouzarides, founder and director of the Milner Therapeutics Institute and Consortium.
“Charles River is uniquely positioned to help guide novel therapies from early discovery through safety testing. Their scientific expertise and wealth of industry knowledge will provide significant collaborative opportunities for the scientists in our program.”
Charles River has been ramping up the deals of late, recently paying out $585 million for WIL Research, and in June buying out CRO Blue Stream Laboratories, making it the CRO’s sixth deal in two years.
- check out the release
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