Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) has teamed up with pharma major Pfizer, to identify new therapeutic targets to prevent and treat obesity and diabetes complications.
With plans to discover new treatments for decreasing insulin resistance in obesity and diabetes, the collaboration will leverage novel screening tools such as systems-biology approaches and technologies developed at Sanford-Burnham.
Based on terms of the three-year agreement, multi-disciplinary teams from Sanford-Burnham and Pfizer will co-operate to recognise and validate new targets for drug discovery.
Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute scientific resources senior director Stephen Gardell said the collaboration focuses on a major medical problem - complications of obesity-related diabetes.
"Working with Pfizer, we can more quickly bridge the gap between basic and translational research," Gardell added.
The partnership integrates Pfizer's expertise in drug discovery together with Sanford-Burnham's expertise in fundamental disease biology and muscle metabolism.
Sanford-Burnham's Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics (Prebys Center) will be used by the scientists to screen for new relevant targets using investigational compounds from Pfizer and evaluate compounds previously identified from the NIH chemical library.
Following completion of the identification of compounds through screening, Sanford-Burnham and Pfizer scientists will co-operate to characterize and further study the "hit" compounds to understand their mechanism of action.
Then, these compounds will be used as "probes" to identify novel therapeutic targets for the treatment of diabetes.
