Novo Nordisk and e-therapeutics alliance to focus on type-2 diabetes

Novo Nordisk has entered into research collaboration with UK-based E-therapeutics for the development of new treatment strategies for a specific area of type-2 diabetes.

Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will jointly work for 12 months using E-therapeutics’ Network-Driven Drug Discovery (NDD) platform.

The partners aim to discover new intervention strategies, biological mechanisms and compounds which will be evaluated as potential basis for novel therapies.

E-therapeutics CEO Dr Ray Barlow said: "This collaboration highlights the use of our NDD platform to understand and potentially create new treatments for complex diseases of great relevance to society, medicine and the industry.

"Our new collaboration with Novo Nordisk is the result of a systematic and rigorous business development exercise over the past year and we hope to announce a number of additional collaborations during the course of 2019."

Novo Nordisk will reimburse E-therapeutics for its work under the alliance, and holds an option to licence the relevant IP generated. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

"Our new collaboration with Novo Nordisk is the result of a systematic and rigorous business development exercise over the past year."

Novo Nordisk Research Center Oxford deputy head Jan Nygaard Jensen said: "We are looking forward to cooperating with e-therapeutics. It is an exciting technology and we will investigate if it can support some of the early target discovery efforts we are building in Novo Nordisk Research Center Oxford."

The Danish pharmaceutical company primarily focuses on offering diabetes care through interventions and long-term outcomes.

Novo Nordisk diabetes portfolio includes a variety of drugs and devices such as Ozempic, Tresiba, Levemir, FlexTouch and NovoPen. It also has various candidates under development.

In August this year, the company acquired 100% shares of UK-based Ziylo for approximately $800m.

The takeover provides Novo Nordisk with all rights to Ziylo’s glucose binding molecule technology that can be used to develop glucose responsive insulins for more effective therapy of hypoglycaemia.

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