Evotec signed a collaboration with Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital focused on the discovery and development of biomarkers and treatments for kidney disease. Evotec and Harvard University are already partnering on a beta cell regeneration alliance, CureBeta, which they initiated in March 2011.
The new CureNephron project, which brings in Brigham and Women’s Hospital scientists, will combine expertise in kidney biology, physiology, and disease, with tools to identify, validate, and develop new drug candidates and biomarkers. The work will focus particularly on identifying disease-modifying mechanisms involved in kidney diseases. Evotec claims the multidisciplinary efforts will provide both new insights into kidney disease biology, and lead to a pipeline of commercially viable drug candidates for both acute and chronic disease.
“The primary mechanisms leading and driving the development of kidney damage have not been systematically explored,” says Harvard University’s Andy McMahon, M.D. “We aim to comprehensively screen for these mechanisms looking at how individual kidney cell types respond to acute and chronic insults during various stages of disease progression as well as during the recovery process.”