Charles River Laboratories and CHDI Foundation announced a five-year extension of their ongoing collaboration. The organizations began working together in 2005 on drug discovery and development for Huntington’s disease (HD), a genetic neurological disease that causes the progressive dysfunction of nerve cells in the brain. The extension will allow more flexible activity across the different Charles River platforms and entail greater integration into CHDI’s programs.

“Our longstanding partnership with CHDI is built on our mutual commitment to developing novel therapies for Huntington’s disease. As an organization, our work with CHDI has led to a much larger commitment to support the HD research community.” said Birgit Girshick, corporate executive vice president, Discovery & Safety Assessment, Biologics Testing Solutions, and Avian Vaccine Services at Charles River.

The contract extension covers multidisciplinary services from across Charles River’s portfolio, including:

• Integrated biology and chemistry capabilities
• Complex primary neuronal assay development
• High-content and fragment-based screening
• Computational chemistry
• Absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) and pharmacokinetics (PK)
• Protein crystallography
• Extensive in vivo pharmacology approaches in research models for translational assessment

Together, Charles River and CHDI have identified novel potential drug targets, bred and validated translational research animal models, run large screens and generated proof-of-concept molecules, and evaluated the potential efficacy of both small molecule and biologic candidates in preclinical models of HD.  Additionally, the expertise developed throughout this partnership has helped more broadly facilitate increased HD research within the larger drug discovery and development community.

 “Charles River’s early drug discovery team has continuously delivered scientific expertise that enables our drug discovery research to produce more efficient results. We are excited to continue our research and work toward delivering a meaningful treatment to patients.”  said Robi Blumenstein, president, CHDI Management, Inc.