The Burrill Report

AstraZeneca announced a pair of deals this week, both aimed at boosting the company’s new virtualization strategy in neuroscience. Neurological disorders continue to present enormous unmet needs, but making progress in battling them has been difficult.

The company first said it would purchase early-stage assets from Link Medicine, a biotech start-up focused on research and development in the field of autophagy, an intracellular process that clears and recycles misfolded proteins. Link has also been developing potential new treatments for a range of neurological diseases. In the second deal, AstraZeneca says it is working with researchers from four North American institutions on new targets for Alzheimer’s drugs.

The deals come just a year after AstraZeneca closed two of its major research centers devoted to neuroscience, one in Sodertalje, Sweden and the other in Montreal, Canada. It was then that AstraZeneca’s R&D chief Martin Mackay said the company would continue to invest in neuroscience, but would work to pursue deals defined by “shared cost, risk, and reward with partners.”

In place of its shuttered R&D facilities, AstraZeneca has set up a virtual neuroscience unit called the Innovative Medicines Unit, or iMed, with the intention of making its neuroscience operations more malleable. The new deal with Link Medicine marks the third such deal for iMed and adds to AstraZeneca’s small molecule assets that target and modulate autophagy, an emerging area or research that can be applied to a range of neurodegenerative diseases.

Though the financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, AstraZeneca will pay Link Medicine an upfront payment and provide milestones payments when and if the molecules it acquired from Link meet certain value inflection points. AstraZeneca has agreed to take on all of the program’s research and development activities.
Menelas Pangalos, executive vice president of the iMed unit says the agreement provides the company “with an entry into an exciting and vital piece of research into autophagy—an area or considerable importance in neuroscience.”

The second of the two deals AstraZeneca announced this week, involves the company collaborating with researchers from four institutions—Weill Cornell Medical College, Washington University, the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, and the University of British Columbia—on research seeking new targets for Alzheimer’s drugs.

The research will focus on a leading risk factor for Alzheimer’s called apolipoprotein E4 genotype, or ApoE. The collaboration, known as the A5 alliance, aims to dive into the biology of ApoE, which isn’t fully understood, and attempt to uncover targets for potential drugs.

At current, Alzheimer’s affects more than 5 million individuals in the United States and nearly 36 million people worldwide. The disease is estimated to afflict nearly 115 million people by 2050 if no breakthroughs are discovered.













July 13, 2012
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-astrazeneca_ramping_up_virtual_neuroscience_effort_.html