Evotec has announced a collaboration with the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Center in California to identify new targets for Alzheimer's disease drug discovery and development.
Under the terms of the agreement, Janssen Pharmaceuticals (Janssen), a member of the Johnson & Johnson family of companies, and Evotec will work together to discover and develop novel treatments for Alzheimer's disease.
Termed TargetAD (Alzheimer's disease),the collaboration will seek to identify new drug targets for discovery of novel treatment approaches to Alzheimer's disease (AD).
Janssen will fund target discovery research via a combination of defined research payments and progress-related milestones over the next three years.
Janssen will have the opportunity to internalise selected targets and therapeutic candidates from the TargetAD database and progress them into pre-clinical and clinical development.
Janssen will reimburse up to $10m in FTE-based research costs and make pre-clinical, clinical, regulatory and commercial payments up to a maximum of between approximately $125m to $145m per programme upon achieving agreed-upon milestones.
In addition, Evotec will receive royalties on future sales of any products that may result from the alliance.
Evotec's proprietary TargetAD database provides a unique source of potentially novel Alzheimer's disease drug targets derived from the analysis of dysregulated genes in high-quality and well-characterised human brain tissues representing all stages of disease progression as well as control tissues from non-demented subjects.
Identifying new targets for drug development based on disease pathology may have the potential to impact the disease at its earliest stages, resulting in greater therapeutic benefit to patients.
Evotec chief scientific officer Cord Dohrmann said, "The TargetAD alliance provides a systematic and comprehensive approach to the discovery of novel drug AD targets which leverages Evotec's strength in neuroscience discovery with Janssen's pre-clinical and clinical drug development capabilities for the discovery of novel treatments for Alzheimer's disease."
