Friday, January 24, 2020
Evotec SE and Indivumed GmbH announced that the companies have entered into a new research collaboration to discover and develop first-in-class therapeutics for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer ("NSCLC"). The final goal of this precision medicine collaboration is to deliver highly effective treatments for NSCLC patients.
The collaboration will combine Evotec's proprietary bioinformatics analysis platform "PanHunter," as well as its small molecule and antibody discovery platforms, with the NSCLC cohort of Indivumed's true multi-omics cancer database "IndivuType," and its advanced analytics and AI capabilities.
This agreement follows the successful progress of the companies' previous joint drug discovery program in the field of colorectal cancer, which was first announced in April 2019 and identified several novel drug targets by September 2019 that will be used in the development of new treatments for the disease. Working together, both parties will jointly invest in data analysis, target identification, validation and subsequent drug discovery. Evotec will be responsible for subsequent partnering of the programs and the platform.
Dr Cord Dohrmann, Chief Scientific Officer of Evotec, commented, "We are excited to add this new discovery program to our successful precision medicine collaboration with Indivumed. We are confident that combining the highly complementary strengths of our companies will generate innovative drug candidates for clearly defined patient populations within non-small cell lung cancer who urgently need effective treatments."
"We are delighted by this new collaboration with Evotec," said Prof. Dr Hartmut Juhl, CEO of Indivumed. "The fast and successful development of our previous joint colorectal cancer program has led to this new agreement, less than twelve months after the first one. Together we will discover and develop novel drugs for the treatment of NSCLC, using as a starting point our IndivuType multi-omics platform."
Indivumed's focus on generating comprehensive high-quality oncology patient data is complementary to Evotec's capabilities in multi-omics data analysis and novel platforms for the generation of first-in-class and clearly differentiated small molecule and antibody therapies. No financial details of the agreement were disclosed.
