Profil Institute lands new alliance focused on metabolic disease
Under the terms of the partnership, Gubra will provide metabolic drug discovery expertise and pre-clinical target validation, as well as preclinical services, including in vivo pharmacology, histology and stereology, molecular biology, and assay development. Profil Institute will provide early phase clinical services, regulatory management, and execution of clinical studies based on compound-specific target product profiling and clinical development planning. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Marcus Hompesch, Profil Institute CEO, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com: “This is set up to be a strategic and long-term partnership, providing for an efficient, effective and integrated discovery – translational clinical research environment that Gubra and Profil can deploy to develop Gubra discoveries or to develop external discoveries brought to the Gubra – Profil alliance. The uniqueness of the approach is its exclusive focus on metabolism.”
As far as what the alliance hopes to achieve, Hompesch told us that there “is no specific number of compounds that we can disclose at this point. An initial Gubra discovery target peptide has been identified and is currently moving through the pre-clinical development stages.”
Both companies are members of the Profil Institute-founded Metabolic Research Partners network, an alliance of service providers to the biopharma and venture capital industries.
Niels Vrang, Gubra CEO, added that “the physical bridging of US and Europe biotech companies in collaborations like this has the potential to unlock ideas and opportunities that either company could not do by themselves.”
Hompesch also told us that the distance between the two companies shouldn’t hamper their relationship, noting that “the Profil – Gubra alliance anticipates that a presence in the US and in Europe, thereby across two of the significant development and regulatory environments, will positively impact the business dynamics in each of those environments.”
