Daiichi Sankyo Co., Limited (hereafter, Daiichi Sankyo) and Max Planck Innovation had signed three years ago providing Daiichi Sankyo with the option to receive the exclusive rights to a new lead compound for the treatment of cancer to be discovered and developed at the Max Planck’s Lead Discovery Center.
This new partnership that was built on biology insights in the field of transcriptional regulation from the work of Prof. Matthias Geyer at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology combined with the Lead Discovery Center’s strong drug discovery expertise in the design of highly selective kinase inhibitors, has now taken off.
In this discovery alliance, the Lead Discovery Center has agreed to identify promising novel targets from its pan-European network of universities and research organizations, to identify potential new treatments for high unmet medical needs.
This attempt focuses on targeted disease areas and novel mechanisms of strategic interest to Daiichi Sankyo—including oncology as well as cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.
Daiichi Sankyo according to the deal has agreed to select individual projects for screening by the Lead Discovery Center through a collection at the time of some 200,000 compounds plus an additional 70,000 compounds contributed from Daiichi Sankyo’s corporate Pharma Space
“It is a great pleasure for us to start this research collaboration with Max Planck Innovation and the Lead Discovery Center to further generate innovation for our cancer drug discovery efforts,” Antoine Yver, M.D., MSc, evp and global head of oncology research and development, Daiichi Sankyo, said in a statement.
“This project collaboration and option agreement is building on the excellent experiences that Daiichi Sankyo and the Lead Discovery Center previously made from a discovery alliance that started in 2014, as well as close ties and many interactions between Daiichi Sankyo and the Max Planck Society, such as the collaboration with the Axel Ullrich lab.” Added Bert Klebl, Ph.D., managing director and CSO at the Lead Discovery Center.
Once the candidate has achieved proof-of-concept at invivo models, the partners said, Daiichi Sankyo will gain exclusive rights to license the program at predefined terms for subsequent preclinical and clinical development.
