LDC and Boehringer Ingelheim join forces to discover schizophrenia treatment

The Lead Discovery Center (LDC), Max Planck Innovation and Boehringer Ingelheim have signed an agreement providing Boehringer Ingelheim with the option to receive the exclusive rights to a new lead compound for the treatment of schizophrenia to be discovered and developed at the LDC.

The novel approach builds on ground-breaking research results from Professor Moritz Rossner and his team at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine in Göttingen. He will work closely together with the LDC team to identify and optimise novel compounds with strong therapeutic potential and develop it further to the stage of a validated pharmaceutical lead with in vivo efficacy.

Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe and disabling mental disorder. Although anti-psychotic medications and psychosocial interventions can effectively reduce symptoms and improve patients’ lives, there remains a strong need for new drugs truly addressing causative mechanisms and cognitive impairment.

“Schizophrenia is an incredibly complex disorder which dramatically changes the life of the individual affected,” says Professsor Rossner. “We believe our approach holds strong potential to improve the treatment options for patients, and this collaboration with the LDC and Boehringer Ingelheim is a great opportunity to advance it from our laboratory into pharmaceutical development.”

LDC’s first joint project in mental disorders

In this early discovery project Boehringer Ingelheim will take a seat on the project development team and will pay an option fee. In addition, the company will allocate internal resources to the programme and support collaborating partners to strengthen the early development work. Once the project has attained proof-of-concept in relevant in vivo models Boehringer Ingelheim can exclusively license the lead at pre-defined terms for subsequent preclinical and clinical development. Any revenue the LDC may receive from commercialisation will be shared with the academic inventors and collaborating institutions.

Dr Bert Klebl, CEO of the LDC, commented on the collaboration: “It is a great pleasure for us to be launching our first joint project in the field of mental disorders, which we believe is often underestimated. We see strong commercial opportunities here, and there is already a strong line-up of promising projects in this area from our academic network.”