Agreements

* On October 31, 2013, Merck Serono, the biopharmaceutical division of Merck, has announced a five-year strategic partnership with the Lead Discovery Center GmbH (LDC), a small molecule drug discovery spin-off of Max Planck Innovation GmbH. This collaboration integrates the expertise and resources of both organizations to expedite the discovery of promising lead structures and to optimize the development of therapeutic candidates in areas of high unmet medical need.

Under the terms of this agreement, Merck Serono and LDC will enter into a broader drug discovery collaboration aiming to identify lead candidates to multiple drug targets.

Merck Serono hereby expands a successful initial collaboration with LDC in oncology into a strategic partnership spanning across all of Merck Serono’s core research and development areas. The first project under the new agreement will be in immunology and emerged from an ongoing collaboration of LDC with the Max-Planck researcher and Nobel Laureate Prof. Robert Huber.

Both organizations will contribute expertise, infrastructure and resources to identify lead candidates and will work closely together in interdisciplinary project teams to advance them into pharmaceutical leads. More specifically, LDC will drive the design, screening and synthesis of compounds during discovery phases, while Merck Serono will provide extended in vitro and in vivo pharmacological profiling, scale up, pre-clinical and pharmacokinetics as well as clinical study design expertise. Merck Serono will be responsible for drug development and commercialization for selected drug candidates.
* On January 20, 2011, the Lead Discovery Center GmbH (LDC) has signed a cooperation agreement with Merck KGaA for the discovery of kinase inhibitors as potential cancer treatments. The collaboration is supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the BioPharma initiative to strengthen the pharmaceutical value chain in Germany. Using an innovative kinase technology platform originating from the Chemical Genomics Centre of the Max Planck Society (CGC, Dortmund), Merck Serono, a division of Merck KGaA, and the LDC aim to identify inhibitory compounds against at least one undisclosed kinase target and advance them through the drug discovery process up to pharmaceutical lead compounds.