News & Events
News & Events
Institut Pasteur Korea Enters Into Agreement with Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases for Tuberculosis Drug Discovery
2009-12-17
Institut Pasteur Korea Enters Into Agreement with Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases for Tuberculosis Drug Discovery
December 17, 2009, Seoul, S. Korea - Institut Pasteur Korea (IPK, www.ip-korea.org) and Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD, www.nitd.novartis.com), Singapore, have entered into a Services Frame Agreement for the identification of safe and effective new therapies for Tuberculosis infected individuals.
This partnership utilizes IPK’s proprietary PhenomicScreen™ technological platform with the chemical compound collection of NITD. IPK’s expertise in high throughput and high content visual screening approaches accelerates the drug discovery process.
IPK Principal Investigators Dr. Priscille Brodin and Dr. Jonathan Cechetto are responsible for identifying active yet non toxic agents that block bacteria replication and infection. This phenotypic approach does not rely on a predefined target, but rather simultaneously selects both chemical compounds and an unknown cellular target solely by the clearly discernible effect on the disease model. The advantage is that the process selects novel targets, and only those, which are functionally significant in the disease process.
Tuberculosis, one of the top 3 killing infectious diseases with AIDS and Malaria, is still a major threat to global health with 8 million new infections each year resulting in more than 2 million deaths worldwide. TB is a bacterial infection caused mainly by Mycobacterium tuberculosis in human. Due to its long duration of treatment, around 6 to 24 months, patients are often treated inadequately or show poor compliance toward treatment, which can lead to the development of multidrug resistant strains (MDR-TB) and extensively drug resistant strains (XDR-TB). Recent drug discovery program is aiming at identifying new compounds with new mechanism of action to improve treatments for MDR-TB and XDR-TB and also dramatically reducing the time required to treat the disease.
Dr. Pablo Bifani, Project Team Head at NITD said “We hope the scientific approach we are exploring with IPK should greatly facilitate the selection of candidate compounds for further drug development.”
“We are very pleased to conclude this partnership with a leading global healthcare player”, Ulf Nehrbass, Chief Executive Officer of Institut Pasteur Korea said, “This agreement to share both parties’ complementary expertise is expected to generate beneficiary synergies and speed up the early steps of drug development for Tuberculosis patients.”
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About Institut Pasteur Korea
Institut Pasteur Korea is a non-profit organization based in South Korea. It was founded in April, 2004 with the strategic focus of enabling technologies and therapeutic development in disease models pertaining to public health. For additional information please visit http://www.ip-korea.org.
December 17, 2009, Seoul, S. Korea - Institut Pasteur Korea (IPK, www.ip-korea.org) and Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD, www.nitd.novartis.com), Singapore, have entered into a Services Frame Agreement for the identification of safe and effective new therapies for Tuberculosis infected individuals.
This partnership utilizes IPK’s proprietary PhenomicScreen™ technological platform with the chemical compound collection of NITD. IPK’s expertise in high throughput and high content visual screening approaches accelerates the drug discovery process.
IPK Principal Investigators Dr. Priscille Brodin and Dr. Jonathan Cechetto are responsible for identifying active yet non toxic agents that block bacteria replication and infection. This phenotypic approach does not rely on a predefined target, but rather simultaneously selects both chemical compounds and an unknown cellular target solely by the clearly discernible effect on the disease model. The advantage is that the process selects novel targets, and only those, which are functionally significant in the disease process.
Tuberculosis, one of the top 3 killing infectious diseases with AIDS and Malaria, is still a major threat to global health with 8 million new infections each year resulting in more than 2 million deaths worldwide. TB is a bacterial infection caused mainly by Mycobacterium tuberculosis in human. Due to its long duration of treatment, around 6 to 24 months, patients are often treated inadequately or show poor compliance toward treatment, which can lead to the development of multidrug resistant strains (MDR-TB) and extensively drug resistant strains (XDR-TB). Recent drug discovery program is aiming at identifying new compounds with new mechanism of action to improve treatments for MDR-TB and XDR-TB and also dramatically reducing the time required to treat the disease.
Dr. Pablo Bifani, Project Team Head at NITD said “We hope the scientific approach we are exploring with IPK should greatly facilitate the selection of candidate compounds for further drug development.”
“We are very pleased to conclude this partnership with a leading global healthcare player”, Ulf Nehrbass, Chief Executive Officer of Institut Pasteur Korea said, “This agreement to share both parties’ complementary expertise is expected to generate beneficiary synergies and speed up the early steps of drug development for Tuberculosis patients.”
###
About Institut Pasteur Korea
Institut Pasteur Korea is a non-profit organization based in South Korea. It was founded in April, 2004 with the strategic focus of enabling technologies and therapeutic development in disease models pertaining to public health. For additional information please visit http://www.ip-korea.org.