The world’s largest producer of insulin is to use e-Therapeutics PLC’s (LON:ETX) Network-Driven Drug Discovery (NDD) platform as it looks to discover new ways of treating type-2 diabetes.

Type-2 diabetes primarily occurs as a result of lack of exercise and obesity and is thought to account for around 90% of the 425mln people with diabetes around the world.

Scientists have been tasked with finding new treatments in order to tackle the growing incidence of the condition.

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As part of the tie-up, Danish pharma giant Novo Nordisk will use ETX’s NDD approach to identify novel intervention strategies, biological pathways and compounds for testing that could potentially form the basis of novel therapies.

e-Therapeutics will be reimbursed for its work under this collaboration and Novo Nordisk has the option to license relevant IP generated under the collaboration.

Any future license would require mutual agreement of commercial terms. Financial details of the collaboration have not been disclosed.

 “We are delighted to be working with Novo Nordisk, a world leader and innovator in diabetes care,” said ETX chief executive Ray Barlow.

“This collaboration highlights the use of our Network-Driven Drug Discovery (NDD) platform to understand and potentially create new treatments for complex diseases of great relevance to society, medicine and the industry.”

“Our new collaboration with Novo Nordisk is the result of a systematic and rigorous business development exercise over the past year and we hope to announce a number of additional collaborations during the course of 2019.”

Novo Nordisk’s head of bioinformatics, Jan Nygaard Jensen, added: “We are looking forward to cooperating with e-therapeutics. It is an exciting technology and we will investigate if it can support some of the early target discovery efforts we are building in Novo Nordisk Research Center Oxford.”