e-therapeutics (AIM:ETX) has entered a collaboration agreement with Galapagos NV to discover new treatments for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and other fibrotic conditions.
The Oxford-based therapeutics group said the partnership will focus on identifying new approaches to modulate one specific mechanism involved in IPF and other fibrotic conditions.
e-therapeutics said will use its proprietary network-driven drug discovery (NDD) platform with Galapagos' expertise to select potentially clinically relevant compounds for treatment.
While financial details of the collaboration remained undisclosed, the company said it will receive upfront and near-term payments material to its cash position and that it is eligible to receive pre-clinical and clinical development and commercial milestone payments.
“This collaboration provides additional validation of our platform and its applications in drug discovery and development,” said Ali Mortazavi, Executive Chairman of e-therapeutics.
Shares in e-therapeutics closed at 17.5p on Tuesday afternoon.
In the US alone there are an estimated 30,000-40,000 cases of IPF diagnosed each year.
There is a high unmet need for effective treatments for IPF which causes progressive loss of lung function and median survival without therapy is limited to between two and three years.
Currently, available treatments can slow disease progression but the prognosis remains poor with the disease remaining the leading cause of lung transplantation.
“This is our third collaboration with a leading biopharmaceutical company,” said Mortazavi, adding “and we remain in business development discussions for both NDD and our functional genomics platform, GAINs."
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