Horizon Discovery, a British firm that provides research tools for the development of personalised medicines, has signed a research service deal with Boehringer.
Cambridge, UK-based Horizon will support Boehringer’s oncology programmes by using its ‘Discovery Toolbox’ for research projects and profiling of compounds at the hit-to-lead, lead optimisation and pre-clinical stages to clarify their anti-cancer properties.
It will also help to guide drug discovery programmes – financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Under the terms of the collaboration, Horizon will evaluate compounds across a broad panel of X-MAN isogenic models and selected 2D/3D phenotypic assays, and will provide an FTE and access to its cell line generation services to support the programmes.
Horizon will also apply its proprietary genome editing technology GENESIS to develop human isogenic disease model cell lines for Boehringer.
Using GENESIS, Horizon is able to alter any endogenous gene sequence of human or mammalian cell lines quickly, reliably and without unwanted and confounding genotypes and/or phenotypes. The resulting high quality cell lines accurately model the disease-causing mutations found in patients.
Kam Dhaliwal, vice president of sales at Horizon, said: “We are delighted that Boehringer Ingelheim has selected Horizon as a partner for its drug discovery programs, in recognition of the value our X-MAN cell lines and drug discovery services can add to the search for novel treatments for cancer.”
