Date: 2012-07-02
Type of information: R&D agreement
Compound: novel combination therapies for the treatment of drug-sensitive and resistant tuberculosis
Company: AstraZeneca (UK) Cellworks (UK)
Therapeutic area: Infectious diseases
Type agreement: R&D
development
Action mechanism:
Disease: tuberculosis
Details: AstraZeneca and Cellworks have announced a collaboration supported by the Wellcome Trust to speed the design of novel combination therapies for the treatment of drug-sensitive and resistant tuberculosis. This collaboration will also pave the way for the creation of platforms and approaches to handle Multi Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB), a condition that is reaching epidemic proportions in many developing parts of the world.
Current therapies for tuberculosis (TB) are based on creating combinations of three to four drugs and cycling through ad-hoc regimens, which are largely ineffective against MDR-TB. Together, Cellworks and AstraZeneca will pull from a pool of existing anti-infective drugs and attempt to find an effective combination with better efficacy and lower toxicity than the treatment regimens provided today. Under this collaboration, Cellworks will use its proprietary predictive platform, which it pioneered in oncology and autoimmune disorders, to model drug MDR-TB and rationally identify \'synergistic combinations\' that might have the highest efficacy and lowest possible toxic burden compared to all currently available combinations. AstraZeneca will then validate the top ten most effective combinations identified by Cellworks in-vitro in its laboratories, followed by validation using in-vivo models.
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