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EMD Serono, ICR, Wellcome Trust collaborate to develop anti-cancer drugs

Merck subsidiary EMD Serono, the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and the Wellcome Trust have entered into a co-development and license agreement for developing new drug candidates to treat different forms of cancer.

The collaboration builds on two independent research programmes at both the ICR and EMD Serono to identify inhibitors of tankyrase, an enzyme of the poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase family.

The deal will be funded by EMD Serono and the Wellcome Trust, while the existing drug discovery programme at the ICR is supported by a Wellcome Trust Seeding Drug Discovery Award.

As part of the deal, a team led by Dr Chris Lord and professor Alan Ashworth at the ICR and a research group at EMD Serono will progress chemical compounds that have emerged from both organizations’ tankyrase inhibitor programs towards clinical development.

The deal will see EMD Serono make milestone payments based on achieving regulatory and sales goals plus royalty payments on net sales of future products discovered or developed as part of the collaboration.

Merck Serono head of the Oncology Translational Innovation Platform Dr Andree Blaukat said: "With this partnership, we aim to harness the already well advanced tankyrase programs at both ICR and EMD Serono and hope to ultimately translate these into novel treatment options for cancer patients.

"We will build on a joint compound base of potent tankyrase inhibitors and will leverage both sites’ scientific knowledge about the ‘Wnt pathway’ that plays a major role in signal transduction for tumor growth.

"The interest of the Wellcome Trust shows its belief in our researchers’ scientific data. It also shows the importance of academia-industry collaboration models in pharmaceutical development to progress the most promising investigational compounds into clinics with the aim of bringing them to patients."