Children's Tumor Foundation and Cenix BioScience sign framework research agreement to accelerate industrial efforts on neurofibromatosis
The Children's Tumor Foundation (CTF), a nonprofit medical foundation dedicated to improving the health and well being of individuals and families affected by neurofibromatosis (NF), and Cenix BioScience announced that they have signed a framework research agreement.
For the Children’s Tumor Foundation, the agreement with Cenix represents an important step in the Foundation’s new initiative to accelerate the application of industrial best practices in translating the growing wealth of scientific understanding from the academic community into an ever-stronger, well-calibrated therapeutic pipeline. The new strategy represents an effective solution in addressing the longstanding challenge of mobilizing large pharmaceutical companies in the fight against rare diseases such as NF. As these same large companies are now themselves increasingly turning to specialized contract research providers to drive more and more of their own pre-clinical work, this outsourcing model offers an important new approach for CTF to more readily access relevant industrial capabilities and know-how.
Through such so-called “virtual pharma” activities, CTF will complement and further build upon the successes of its ongoing initiatives and funding programs, including the NF Pre-Clinical Consortium, the Drug Discovery Initiative, the NF Clinical Network, as well as the awards and grants program that have been longstanding drivers in these fields.
“We are starting with carefully selected contract research providers who we know to have very strong, well-established track records in driving key types of translational R&D for top-level pharmas in disease fields of high-relevance to NF, such as oncology and neurological indications,” noted Dr. Annette Bakker, Chief Scientific Officer of the Children’s Tumor Foundation. “Importantly, we are not automatically going to the largest ‘one-stop-shop’ organizations, but rather, identifying those that combine specialist-level expertise in our key priority areas with clear reputations for delivering consistently top- value output for their clients over the years. Not only does Cenix fit this bill perfectly, but their longstanding commitment to supporting rare and neglected disease research, as evidenced by their past work on malaria, makes them an even more welcome partner for the CTF.”
For Cenix, the new agreement, driven by its recently-established U.S. subsidiary, offers an ideal opportunity to further leverage the company’s well-proven core expertise with key pre-clinical R&D activities, including advanced RNAi-, genomics- and high content biology-driven discovery and validation of novel therapeutic targets, analyses of drug mechanisms of action, predictive toxicology and identification of novel biomarkers. Over more than a decade of successfully advancing industrial pharmaceutical and biotech programs in a wide range of disease indications, Cenix has taken particular pride in offering equal access to the same capabilities on preferential terms for academic groups and particularly for those tackling rare and neglected diseases.
Accordingly, the present agreement secures preferential access to the full range of contract research capabilities offered by Cenix, its affiliates and their partners, to drive future preclinical projects in the NF1, NF2 and schwannomatosis fields, as commissioned either by CTF alone or with third party collaborators.
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