Merck’s neuroscience portfolio is thin, since fail An Alzheimer’s drug was used in a pivotal clinical trial five years ago. Biotech company Cerevance has successfully discovered and advanced a Parkinson’s disease drug candidate, and Merck now hopes to use the startup’s technology to see if it can produce similar results in Alzheimer’s disease.
pharma giant is $25 million to Cerevance Collaboration begins early with a focus on discovering new targets for memory-deprivation disorders.
Cerevance discovers drugs using technology that analyzes healthy and diseased post-mortem tissue in human brains. The samples came from donors ranging in age from 8 to 104 years old. The samples also represented multiple regions of the brain. Cerevance believes that analyzing human brain tissue has revealed biological pathways in brain disease that are difficult to observe in animal models, even when using differentiated human stem cells. The technique is called nuclear enriched transcript sequencing sequencing (NETSseq).
In collaboration with Merck, Cerevance will use its technology to discover new targets for potential Alzheimer’s drugs. Years of alliances have started with one project. As part of the collaboration agreement, Cerevance will license one of its discovery-phase projects to Merck & Co. The Boston-based biotechnology company could receive up to $1.1 billion in development and commercial milestone payments, as well as royalties on sales, based on the progress of the collaborative research.
Cerevance’s most advanced in-house program is its Parkinson’s candidate program, CVN424. By targeting indirect disease-related pathways, the small molecule is designed to produce the effects of levodopa and deep brain stimulation, two standard Parkinson’s treatments. L-dopa (levodopa), a commonly used Parkinson’s drug, is converted by the brain into dopamine, a neurotransmitter deficiency thought to be at the root of the disease.
March, Cerevance report Data from a placebo-controlled Phase 2 study that enrolled 135 patients. The results showed that treatment with its drug resulted in a “significant and meaningful” reduction in dose-dependent off-time, which is the time of day when Parkinson’s symptoms recur, despite treatment with levodopa and other drugs.
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