Non-profit group selects Evotec as partner in search for Huntington's disease treatments

By E. Janene Geiss

Philadelphia, Aug. 10 - Evotec AG announced Thursday that CHDI, Inc., a not-for profit organization pursuing a biotech approach to finding therapies for Huntington's disease, has chosen Evotec as a strategic partner for helping them advance its drug discovery programs.

Since March, Evotec and CHDI have signed four agreements covering medicinal chemistry, assay development and medium-throughput screening, ultra-high-throughput screening and library synthesis and management services, according to a company news release.

These contracts cover most of Evotec's integrated discovery offering, officials said.

With access to these resources, CHDI said it has all the tools in place to rapidly discover novel drugs against Huntington's disease targets and further optimize them to the point of clinical development.

Both parties said they envision expanding the agreements to accommodate further discovery capabilities of Evotec as and when required.

In the course of this collaboration, Evotec said it will apply its biological science expertise to develop assays, including those designed for high content screening, against high priority biological targets thought to be of importance to treating Huntington's disease provided by CHDI and the High Q Foundation.

Working with medicinal chemists at CHDI, Evotec said it will apply its own medicinal chemistry and parallel synthesis skills to synthesize libraries of novel small molecule compounds.

Evotec said it also will use its proprietary platform to screen these compounds and Evotec's own library to identify compounds with biological activity.

Using Evotec's medicinal chemistry, profiling and Admet (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion and Toxicity) expertise, active compounds will be further characterized to generate lead molecules for further progression into clinical trials, officials said.

Evotec is a Hamburg, Germany, biopharmaceutical company.

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