Pfizer, Sanford-Burnham in Diabetes Discovery Pact

Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute and Pfizer have entered into a three-year collaboration to identify new therapeutic targets for preventing and treating complications of obesity and diabetes using novel screening tools, including systems-biology approaches and technologies developed at Sanford-Burnham.
 
Sanford-Burnham and Pfizer will collaborate to identify and validate new targets for drug discovery. Investigators will use Sanford-Burnham’s Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics to screen for new targets using Pfizer’s investigational compounds, as well as evaluate compounds previously identified from the NIH chemical library.
 
“Diabetes presents an enormous public health burden. There is an acute need to translate innovative science into potential new medicines for people living with this debilitating disease,” said Tim Rolph, vice president and head of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases Research Unit at Pfizer. “Pfizer’s collaboration with Sanford-Burnham to use their cutting-edge screen designs is an example of our strategy to work with academic innovators to discover novel therapeutics for prevention and treatment of diabetes.”
 
“This important collaboration focuses our tremendous scientific and translational firepower on a major medical problem, complications of obesity-related diabetes. Working with Pfizer, we can more quickly bridge the gap between basic and translational research,” said Stephen Gardell, Ph.D., senior director of scientific resources at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute at Lake Nona.