Boehringer Ingelheim in Ridgefield recently announced new collaborations with four scientific partners to better research and develop therapeutic approaches for patients with inflammatory bowel disease, often called IBD.
The institutions are the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Massachusetts General Hospital; Scripps Research Institute; and Weill Cornell Medicine.
“These collaborations aim to identify and validate potential new therapeutic targets as well as identify biomarkers that offer the potential to address the significant unmet medical needs of patients suffering from IBD such as Crohn”™s disease and ulcerative colitis,” Boehringer Ingelheim said in a prepared statement.
“Academia-industry collaborations are an extraordinarily effective way to advance research and we recognize the importance of joining forces with leading experts to effectively develop innovative therapies,” said Clive Wood, senior corporate vice president for discovery research at Boehringer Ingelheim. “We must gain a better understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the onset and development of IBD-related diseases such as Crohn”™s disease and ulcerative colitis. With these collaborations, we aim to transform the treatment of immune diseases to ultimately improve lives of patients and those who care for them.”
The partnerships are an effort to enhance the speed of research and to foster information sharing. Boehringer Ingelheim will also provide scientific and technology support as well as research funding to the four scientific partners.
In its statement, Boehringer Ingelheim offered specifics of the four relationships.
∙ “The joint research teams from Mount Sinai (in New York City) and BI will collaborate to interrogate both adaptive and innate immune response mechanisms that may be unique to both Crohn”™s disease and ulcerative colitis. This research is expected to provide new insights into IBD pathogenesis and offers unique opportunities for target discovery and biomarker validation.”
∙ “Boehringer Ingelheim”™s ongoing collaboration with Dr. Frederick Ausubel at Massachusetts General Hospital will leverage the state-of-the-art, high-throughput chemical and genetic screening capabilities to uncover new mechanisms at the host-environment interface that are compromised in patients with IBD.”
∙ “The objective of Boehringer Ingelheim”™s collaboration with Dr. Dennis Wolan at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., is to gain a deeper understanding of the role of specific bacterial enzymes in the onset of ulcerative colitis. Wolan”™s research effort will focus on utilizing biophysical, proteomic and chemical biology methods to identify new protein targets involved in the pathology of ulcerative colitis.”
∙ “The research collaboration with Dr. David Artis and Dr. Gregory Sonnenberg at the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in IBD at Weill Cornell Medicine (in New York City) will jointly pursue an integrated preclinical and translational research program related to certain defined cellular processes and targets that regulate the maintenance of the gut mucosal barrier in healthy and IBD-affected patients. This work is anticipated to lead to the discovery and validation of new therapeutic modalities and biomarker approaches for IBD.”
Boehringer Ingelheim reported IBD affects 1 million to 1.3 million people in the U.S. It also said IBD is a chronic life-long condition with significant health and economic costs and that 75 percent of patients with Crohn”™s disease and 25 percent with ulcerative colitis may require surgery at some point during their lives.
