The Dementia Discovery Fund and Immuneering announce a Research Collaboration to identify novel drug targets and drug candidates for Alzheimer's disease
Cambridge, MA and London, 18 June 2018 - The Dementia Discovery Fund (“DDF”) and Immuneering Corporation (“Immuneering”) today announce they have entered into a joint research collaboration to identify novel drug targets and drug candidates for Alzheimer's disease. As part of the collaboration, the DDF will invest $1.3 million for the use of Immuneering's proprietary computational drug discovery platform to analyse publicly available data sets from Alzheimer’s disease patients. The goal of the collaboration is to identify clinically identifiable, mechanistically linked subpopulations within Alzheimer’s disease and generate new molecular entities (NMEs) that will ultimately lead to new medicines to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
Since its launch in February 2008, Immuneering has partnered with leading pharmaceutical companies to accelerate and improve the discovery and clinical development of novel drugs. The Immuneering team applies proprietary computational biology methods and an advanced drug discovery platform to high-throughput molecular data (including gene expression, genomics, and binding data). Immuneering’s data-driven approach to drug discovery is particularly well-suited to help unravel the complexity of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Ben Zeskind, CEO, Immuneering, said: “Together with the DDF, we aim to help further the scientific understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and identify disease-modifying medications by combining patient data with our drug discovery platform.”
Since its launch in October 2015, the DDF has built a portfolio of investments in drug discovery companies and projects in the UK and US in areas including microglial biology and inflammation, mitochondrial dynamics, trafficking and membrane biology, and synaptic physiology and function. The DDF team believes there is a significant opportunity to apply insights from diverse areas such as oncology and immunology to develop novel drugs targeting specific biological pathways that drive different clinical presentations of dementia.
Tetsu Maruyama, CSO, DDF, said: “The successful discovery of new treatments for dementia will require new approaches that are both systematic and different to what has been attempted to date. This collaboration brings together Immuneering’s unique drug discovery platform with DDF’s novel approach to identifying and investing in novel science to create meaningful new medicines for dementia. We believe this collaboration holds great promise for providing new insights that will lead to new targets and, ultimately, new medicines for people with Alzheimer’s.
