Harvard, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and German Drug Discovery Company Expand Alliance into Kidney Disease Research

The first successful collaboration, CureBeta, was established in March 2011 to develop new diabetes treatments targeting beta cell regeneration.

Presently, Harvard, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Evotec also bring together broad expertise in kidney biology, physiology, and disease combined with an innovative array of tools to identify, validate, and develop candidate targets and biomarkers. The alliance will perform systematic and unbiased approaches towards the identification of kidney disease relevant processes with specific interest in mechanisms with disease-modifying possibilities. This program, called CureNephron, is designed to deliver and exploit novel therapeutic targets as well as biomarkers that allow more effective diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of chronic and acute kidney disease.

Advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD) and severe forms of acute kidney injury have very limited treatment alternatives and are associated with high morbidity and mortality. Novel therapeutic approaches are required that have the potential to protect and restore the function of key kidney cell types, intending to slow and reverse disease progression for patients with non-dialysis-dependent CKD as well as patients with ESRD on dialysis.

“We are extremely proud to work with Dr. Andy McMahon and Dr. Ben Humphreys, who are highly accomplished scientists and clinicians in this exciting field. Together with Evotec scientists, they will be part of a uniquely cross-functional team covering kidney biology, physiology, and disease as well as leading drug discovery expertise. Our combined efforts will lead to new insights into kidney disease biology and fuel a pipeline of commercially exciting drug candidates in acute and chronic kidney disease,” said Dr. Cord Dohrmann, CSO of Evotec.

Dr. Andy McMahon, a professor at Harvard University, said, “The primary mechanisms leading and driving the development of kidney damage have not been systematically explored. We aim to comprehensively screen for these mechanisms looking at how individual kidney cell types respond to acute and chronic insults during various stages of disease progression as well as during the recovery process.”

Dr. Ben Humphreys, associate physician in the renal division, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, added, “As chronic diseases such as diabetes continue to grow at alarming rates there is an ever increasing need to develop new treatment options for diabetes related comorbidities, which include end stage renal disease. In collaboration with Evotec, we are enthusiastic about identifying and exploring new mechanisms that have the potential to modify disease progression and hopefully produce first-in-class therapeutics for the treatment of kidney disease.”

“We’re very pleased to expand our alliance, which is testimony to a highly productive working relationship with Evotec in diabetes,” said Isaac T. Kohlberg, Harvard’s chief technology development officer and head of its Office of Technology Development. “This new collaboration involving researchers from Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital as well as Evotec is a great example of joining forces across traditional academic and industrial boundaries to more rapidly advance groundbreaking science to the stage of translational medicine and ultimately patients.”

Evotec is a drug discovery alliance and development partnership company focused on rapidly advancing novel product approaches with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

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