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Kareus ties with Connexios to develop Alzheimer's disease drug

Our Bureau, MumbaiThursday, February 28, 2008, 08:00 Hrs  [IST]

Kareus Therapeutics entered into a collaboration agreement with Connexios Life Sciences in the discovery of novel therapies for Alzheimer's disease. Kareus will bring to the collaboration its expertise in the understanding of novel mechanisms in the pathology of Alzheimer's while Connexios will bring in its proprietary network biology platform as well as its systems pharmacology driven small molecule discovery capabilities. Commenting on the agreement, Dr Uday Saxena, co-founder and managing partner of Kareus said "This is an exciting collaboration because it marries new target based discovery with the power of systems biology. We can now look at molecular pathways that normally get overlooked with a single target approach. It is like buying a new home and finding a map of all the roadways that it is connected with. We believe this alliance will accelerate our discovery of new therapeutics and targets". Kareus Therapeutics is an emerging US based company engaged in discovery of new drugs for CNS and age-related diseases which are currently underserved for optimal treatments. The company applies target and gene expression based approaches in its discovery efforts. It uses strategic alliances with companies which have complementary and synergystic skills to build its drug pipeline. Dr Suri Venkatachalam, CEO, Connexios Life Sciences said, "This partnership with Kareus allows us to get into a completely new therapeutic area and the fact that we can leverage the deep understanding of the biology of Alzheimer's and knowledge of novel targets that the Kareus team brings to the table gives us a jump start. The complementarities between this biology and our approach will help us to very rapidly create unique therapeutic options in an area which is desperately in need of new treatment modalities". Connexios Life Sciences is a systems biology based drug discovery company based in Bangalore, India. Connexios has built a unique network biology based drug discovery platform which permits early engagement with the biology of disease and drug action through a large library of protein, cell and animal based assays. This approach serves to reduce cycle time and costs and increase the efficiency of downstream studies leading up to clinical development. Connexios is developing an internal pipeline of molecules in multiple therapeutic areas using this discovery platform.

 
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