Shanghai Institute, Crown Bioscience Enter Strategic Pact

Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and Crown Bioscience, Inc., have formed a strategic collaboration focused on translational oncology and will join forces to build a mouse clinical trial center called SIMM-Crown Mouse Clinical Trial Center (SCMC), at Crown Taicang campus, in Taicang, Jiangsu province, China.

The partnership aims to build the world’s first and largest mouse clinical center featuring advanced translational oncology platforms with fully annotated collections of patient derived xenograft (PDX) models. The center will combine the existing model collections of both organizations and build several thousand new models focusing on major Asian cancer types, including liver (HCC), lung (NSCLC), gastric (GC) and colorectal (CRC) cancers. The center will also work to advance PDX based translational oncology platforms leveraging Crown’s oncology discovery and translational capabilities, HuPrime 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, HuKemia, HuTrial, and HuSignature platforms. 

Dr. Jian Ding, director general of SIMM, and the center’s first president, said, “As the largest government-founded research institute focusing on drug development in China, SIMM aims at inventing more world-class drugs to benefit patients in China and worldwide. The premium oncology translational research platform based on PDX models will enable us to have a better understanding of our candidate drugs and to stratify the responsive subgroup patients for personalized therapy. SIMM is excited about the opportunity of building up a first class translation oncology center together with Crown to accelerate the development of precision medicines for oncology applications.”

Dr. Jean-Pierre Wery, Crown’s president said, “Crown plays a leading role in providing cutting-edge translational platforms and cost effective drug discovery solutions for almost all top pharmaceutical companies worldwide. Crown is very happy to partner with SIMM, the premium drug discovery CAS institute in China, to offer the world with first class translational oncology services, and ultimately benefit cancer patients all around the world. This center will further strengthen Crown’s leading position as the oncology discovery and translational medicine partner in the global market.”