NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Max Planck Innovation spinout, the Lead Discovery Center, today announced a collaboration with Merck for the discovery of kinase inhibitors as potential cancer treatments.
The partnership will use a kinase technology platform developed by the Chemical Genomics Centre of the Max Planck Society. Merck Serono, a division of Merck, and LDC will seek to identify inhibitory compounds against at least one undisclosed kinase target and advance them through the drug discovery pipeline to pharmaceutical lead compounds, LDC said.
LDC and Merck Serono will work together in the fields of assay development, screening, medicinal chemistry, and pharmacology.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"The alliance is a major milestone for the LDC and could well become a role model for highly efficient and professional collaboration between academia and industry," Bert Klebl, managing director of LDC, said in a statement. "It verifies LDC's positioning as a translational research center with the aim of leveraging excellent academic research for industrial application and the development of medicines."
Based in Dortmund, Germany, LDC was jointly developed by Max Planck Innovation and the Max Planck Society.