Florida Hospital and Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute have teamed up with Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd. to research and evaluate new drug therapies for obesity and its negative health consequences such as diabetes and heart disease, the three entities jointly announced.
“There is an epidemic of obesity in the US; two-thirds of Americans are now overweight or obese. These staggering statistics serve as a call for decisive action, including innovative bench-to-bedside translational research,” says Steven R. Smith, MD, scientific director of the Florida Hospital-Sanford-Burnham Translational Research Institute (TRI) for Metabolism and Diabetes, where the Florida Hospital work will be performed. “This partnership with Takeda, TRI and Sanford-Burnham represents a major milestone in the quest for a better understanding of obesity as a disease and a pathway forward for the development of safe and effective therapies.”
The Centers for Disease Control report that more than one-third of Americans are overweight and another one-third are obese. Obesity causes at least 112,000 premature deaths in the United States each year and reduces lifespan by up to eight years. Medical-related expenses attributable to obesity are projected to top $344 billion by 2018.
The partnership is the first corporate-sponsored research jointly undertaken by Sanford-Burnham and TRI. Advanced technologies, including genomic and metabolite profiling, will be used to identify metabolic signatures, genes and pathways that could serve as biomarkers, and novel drug targets aimed at developing more personalized treatments for obesity and its complications. The research model combines laboratory research with detailed investigations of patient cohorts so that scientists can compare data from experimental models and humans to identify genetic and metabolomic matches.
“This research partnership is a collaborative model that capitalizes on the synergistic expertise of each group and provides all partners with access to our Cardiometabolic Phenotyping, Metabolomics and Genomics technology cores,” says Daniel P. Kelly, MD, scientific director, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute. “It offers much promise for expediting new drug candidates into Takeda’s development pipeline.”
The two-year collaboration includes research funding from Takeda divided between Florida Hospital-TRI and Sanford-Burnham. Takeda executives say the collaboration represents one of the largest discovery research partnerships that it has conducted with the not-for-profit sector.
“We view this collaboration as an opportunity to further Takeda’s goal of identifying targets for new therapeutics to treat obesity and its negative health consequences, including metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and heart disease.” says Paul Chapman, general manager, head of Pharmaceutical Research Division of Takeda.
The partners say the agreement will set the stage for future collaborative drug discovery campaigns aimed at novel therapeutics to treat obesity.
John Commins is the news editor for HealthLeaders.