Cerevance Hits First Milestone in Merck Collaboration
Cerevance, a Boston-based company dedicated to creating precision treatments for central nervous system (CNS) diseases, has announced a significant milestone in its collaborative research with Merck, known as MSD outside the United States and Canada. This collaboration, initiated in August 2022, aims to identify new therapeutic targets for Alzheimer’s disease. The successful achievement of this milestone will result in an undisclosed payment from Merck to Cerevance.
Craig Thompson, CEO of Cerevance, expressed enthusiasm about the progress made in the partnership with Merck. He highlighted that this milestone underscores the capability of their proprietary Nuclear Enriched Transcript Sort sequencing (NETSseq) platform in pinpointing new targets for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders.
Cerevance utilized its NETSseq platform to identify potential targets, from which Merck has chosen several to move forward to the target validation phase.
Cerevance is at the forefront of developing precise treatments for CNS disorders, which include chronic neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, frontotemporal dementia, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The company leverages a vast and continually growing repository of over 15,000 human brain tissue samples. This extensive resource allows Cerevance to generate a significant amount of expression and epigenetic data, helping it to identify promising targets for innovative CNS disorder treatments.
The company’s NETSseq platform, combined with advanced machine learning techniques, enables the identification of gene expression profiles in specific cell types. This process helps to uncover novel targets uniquely present in circuits impacted by diseases or altered in disease states. Using this data and the expertise of its scientific team, Cerevance is advancing multiple therapeutic candidates through clinical development. Among the most advanced are CVN424, CVN766, and CVN293.
CVN424 is a pioneering non-dopamine therapy that holds potential for improving both motor and non-motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease, with possible disease-delaying effects. CVN766 is a highly selective antagonist of the orexin 1 receptor, which could be beneficial for various psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, anxiety/panic disorders, binge eating/obesity, substance use disorder, and Prader-Willi Syndrome. CVN293 is a novel inhibitor of potassium efflux in glial cells, which plays a role in regulating the inflammasome in patients with neurodegenerative diseases.
How to obtain the latest research advancements in the field of biopharmaceuticals?
In the Synapse database, you can keep abreast of the latest research and development advances in drugs, targets, indications, organizations, etc., anywhere and anytime, on a daily or weekly basis. Click on the image below to embark on a brand new journey of drug discovery!
