Nimbus Therapeutics and Charles River Laboratories said today they have expanded a long-standing partnership by agreeing to advance new therapeutic programs from the discovery phase through IND submission.
The value of the new multiyear strategic partnership was not disclosed, though the companies said Charles River is eligible to receive potential payments from Nimbus tied to achieving undisclosed milestones.
The new programs will focus on immunology, metabolic disorders, and oncology—and according to the companies, will broaden their collaboration beyond designing new drugs against targets “of critical importance.”
Charles River and Nimbus said their partnership will advance programs through discovery and preclinical development by using Charles River’s capabilities from initial hit identification through all aspects of discovery optimization, including medicinal chemistry and pharmacology, followed by safety testing and IND submission.
“We expect that our portfolio of discovery and safety assessment expertise, together with Nimbus’ impressive track record in using computational chemistry to accelerate drug discovery, will result in additional speed and scale to their future pipeline,” James Foster, Charles River’s chairman, president, and CEO, said in a statement.
Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, privately-held Nimbus partners with co-founder Schrödinger to apply its computational chemistry platform toward the design of new treatments for metabolic diseases, cancer, and immune-inflammatory disorders.
Nimbus closed a $24 million Series A financing in June 2011, and a $43 million Series B financing in March 2015, attracting investors that include Atlas Venture, SR One, Lilly Ventures, Bill Gates, Pfizer Venture Investments, and Lightstone Ventures.
“Charles River’s broad experience in discovery research across multiple therapeutic areas, as well as background in safety assessment, makes them a highly-valued contributor to Nimbus’ drug discovery efforts,” added Nimbus CEO Don Nicholson, Ph.D. “We’re looking forward to furthering our collaboration with Charles River as we work together to progress the most promising targets through discovery and preclinical development.”
