NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Drug discovery firm Immuneering is teaming with the UK-based Dementia Discovery Fund in an effort to identify new drug targets and candidates for patients with Alzheimer's disease.
The Dementia Discovery Fund, or DDF, said today that it will spend $1.3 million to use Immuneering's drug discovery platform to analyze public data sets on Alzheimer's patients. DDF and Immuneering hope to generate new molecular entities for potential treatment of the neurodegenerative disease.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Immuneering has developed proprietary methods of applying computational biology to high-throughput molecular data, including gene expression, genomics, and binding data. The company was majority owned by Teva Pharmaceutical Industries as recently as 2015. According to a company spokesperson that is no longer the case, though additional details were not provided.
"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." Tetsu Maruyama, chief scientific officer of DDN, said in a statement.
"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," Immuneering CEO Ben Zeskind added.