Addex Pharmaceuticals, a leading biopharmaceutical company pioneering allosteric modulation-based drug discovery and development, announced that it will regain all rights to its metabotropic glutamate receptor 4 (mGluR4) positive allosteric modulator (PAM) programme from Merck, known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, due to further pipeline prioritization.

"We continue to strongly believe that mGluR4 is a highly attractive target for treating Parkinson's and other serious diseases," said Bharatt Chowrira, CEO of Addex. "We recognize the substantial challenges for the pharmaceutical industry today and we thank our partner for this collaboration and the significant advances we made together in targeting this important receptor. We remain committed to pursuing mGluR4 PAM for Parkinson's and other diseases."

Under the agreement, Addex will regain rights to intellectual property and know-how and can pursue the programme independently.

Addex Pharmaceuticals discovers and develops an emerging class of small molecule drugs, called allosteric modulators, which have the potential to be more specific and confer significant therapeutic advantages over conventional "orthosteric" small molecule or biological drugs.