Roche and Genentech have partnered withThe Weill Neurohub to accelerate the development of new therapeutics targeting brain diseases and disorders of the central nervous system (CNS).
Roche and Genentech will join forces with The Weill Neurohub as part of the Alliance for Therapies in Neuroscience (ATN) for ten years to collaborate on and advance neuroscience research.
The Weill Neurohub is a joint research collaboration between the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), UC Berkeley and the University of Washington.
It was launched in 2019 to bring together researchers from different disciplines to focus on disorders of the brain and nervous system.
As part of the ATN, Genentech will provide UCSF and UC Berkeley up to $53m over the course of the ten-year research period.
The initial areas of focus for the ATN are neurodegeneration, CRISPR-based therapeutics, protein degradation, functional genomics in human brain cells and sleep mechanisms and circuits.
The collaboration will use expertise and resources from both academia and industry to enable joint project teams to gain an improved understanding of disease pathologies, as well as discover novel targets and generate new preclinical models to further fast-track the development of new therapeutics for CNS disorders.
The first projects funded by the ATN will focus on four key areas of need for neurological and psychiatric disorders.
This includes developing biomarkers to track disease progression and the effectiveness of future therapies; understanding molecular pathways of protein breakdown that drive disease; parsing genetic and protein profiles linked to CNS disorders; and developing therapeutics for brain diseases based on CRISPR technologies.
“At Genentech and Roche, we are strongly committed to discovering and developing breakthrough medicines to help improve the lives of people living with neurological disorders, which are some of the most complex conditions to understand and treat,” said James Sabry, global head of pharma partnering at Roche.
“We are excited to join forces with The Weill Neurohub researchers and clinicians to accelerate scientific and clinical advancements for neurological disorders so that we can slow, or even one day reverse, the progression of these conditions,” he added.