NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — Sanford-Burnham today announced a collaboration with Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals to discover compounds for Alzeheimer's disease and major psychiatric disorders.
Under the terms of the three-year deal, Sanford will receive upfront and yearly access fees, funding of discovery research in the field, milestone payments, and royalties for products stemming from the partnership. A joint steering committee will oversee the collaboration, including a drug discovery team funded by OMJPI in the Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics at Sanford-Burnham.
The center is a screening facility at Sanford-Burnham established by the National Institutes of Health as part of an effort to hasten commercialization of basic research "by generating small molecule probes that can be used to develop a pipeline of drugs to treat unmet medical needs," Sanford-Burnham said in a statement.
Multidisciplinary teams from Sanford-Burnham and OMJPI will seek to identify and validate new targets for drug discovery and new compounds for further development by OMJPI.
"This represents the first of what we expect to be a series of thematic collaborations that focus our tremendous scientific and translational firepower on major unmet medical problems," said Dr. John Reed, CEO of Sanford-Burnham. "Working in concert with strong partners, we can bridge the gap between early- and late-stage drug development.”