The Lead Discovery Center GmbH (LDC) and AstraZeneca have expanded their alliance to discover new medicines for the treatment of diseases with high unmet medical need, according to report published on BioSpace.com.

Through an additional three-year period of collaboration, AstraZeneca expects to provide an extended set of high-quality compounds to the LDC’s internal screening collection to pursue projects in the areas of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, oncology, respiratory and inflammation and neuroscience.

 Under the terms of the alliance, the LDC will screen the combined compound collection of more than 450,000 compounds against a portfolio of innovative biological targets, the article notes. Targets will be carefully selected by the LDC from its broad range of academic partner institutions, including members of the Max Planck Society, Germany’s leading basic research organization. A joint steering committee oversees the collaboration and reviews the output. The LDC takes the most promising compounds into further drug discovery by “optimizing them into pharmaceutical leads with in vivo proof-of-concept.”

For its part, AstraZeneca has a preferred right to obtain a license for pre-clinical and clinical development and commercialization for collaborative projects.
The partnership renewal follows a successful two-year period of collaboration and establishes the LDC as one of AstraZeneca’s four leading translational centers, according to the article. The LDC and AstraZeneca already initiated six high-potential drug discovery projects over the past two years that are showing promise.

Source: BioSpace.com