Evotec SE and Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) are expanding an existing iPSC (induced pluripotent stem cells) collaboration. Evotec has received a $6 million payment from BMS following the decision to expand the collaboration to include additional cell lines.
 
Evotec and Celgene, which is now a BMS company, initiated the collaboration in December 2016 to identify disease-modifying treatments for a broad range of neurodegenerative diseases. Currently approved drugs only offer short-term management of patients’ symptoms and there is a large unmet medical need for therapies that slow down or reverse disease progression in the field of neurodegenerative diseases.
 
This collaboration pursues an innovative approach to the discovery and development of novel medicines by leveraging several of Evotec’s technology platforms in conjunction with the human iPSC-based platform, which is one of the largest and most sophisticated platforms in the industry. The iPSC partnership between BMS and Evotec has already been expanded with additional cell lines several times.
 
“We are very pleased about this latest expansion of our iPSC-alliance with Bristol-Myers Squibb,” said Cord Dohrmann, chief scientific officer, Evotec. “Patient-derived disease models will be instrumental to improving the translatability of pre-clinical discovery efforts into clinical benefits and we are proud to leverage our proprietary iPSC platform together with Bristol-Myers Squibb for the benefit of the patients.”