BioMed X Innovation Center and Merck Serono have extended their collaboration to develop unique innovation models between academia and industry. Merck Serono extended the funding of the first two international research groups for a third year.

Under BioMed X and Merck’s innovation model, outstanding life science talents from leading academic institutions worldwide were selected to work on metabolism and signaling in cancer, on tools to improve the selectivity of kinase inhibitors and on new approaches to overcome the immunosuppressive microenvironment of tumors. One of the latest successes was the release of KinMap, a free web-based tool for creating and sharing interactive annotations of the human kinome tree (kinhub.org/kinmap).

“We are impressed with the progress achieved by the teams since the start of the projects two years ago. It is great to see that the new open innovation concept we have developed works so well in practice.” said Ulrich Betz, head Innovation & Entrepreneurship Incubator Merck Serono. “Merck Serono’s decision to extend its funding of our first two research groups marks an important milestone for our center,” said Christian Tidona , founder and Managing Director of BioMed X. “It clearly indicates that our new innovation model creates real value for the pharmaceutical industry.”