PsychoGenics, Evotec To Work on CNS Drugs

PsychoGenics and Evotec AG have entered into a strategic alliance to provide integrated CNS drug discovery solutions to pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The two companies will work together to provide existing and new clients access to their complementary drug discovery platforms for the identification and development of new therapeutics to treat CNS disorders.

PsychoGenics’ proprietary behavioral testing platforms are used for the characterization of drugs, the phenotyping of disease models and the multi-dimensional testing of drugs in disease models. Evotec offers an advanced technology platform, a broad range of integrated capabilities and therapeutic area expertise in metabolic disease, CNS, pain, inflammation and oncology.

Dr. Mario Polywka, Evotec’s chief operating officer, said “By bringing together the industry-leading CNS drug discovery platforms of Evotec and PsychoGenics, our clients and partners will benefit through an increased probability of success and faster and more informed decision making in their drug discovery efforts with the goal of delivering preclinical candidates in the most time and cost efficient manner.”

Dr Emer Leahy, PsychoGenics’ president and chief executive officer, added, “We are delighted to enter into this collaboration with Evotec, an innovative leader in drug discovery. PsychoGenics and Evotec each have a long-standing history of successful partnerships in which they share discovery risk with pharmaceutical companies, and have delivered several pre-clinical candidates. Now, by combining forces, partners have the opportunity to avail themselves of fully-integrated and proprietary capabilities to drive and transform their CNS discovery programs and lower their overall risk.”