Pharma giant Novo Nordisk has extended its contract with e-Therapeutics PLC (LON:ETX) for the UK drug discovery firm to help search for novel treatments for type-2 diabetes.
Extending the agreement for another six months to June 2020, e-Therapeutics will now also use its new Genome-Associated Interaction Networks (GAINs) technology to analyse patterns within the genomics data from patients with type-2 diabetes.
READ: e-Therapeutics eyes further partnerships and possibly M&A to fully exploit its potential
This extension, the first research agreement for the GAINs technology, follows on from the collaboration formed last December for e-Therapeutics’ Network-Driven Drug Discovery (NDD) platform to be used to try and find new intervention strategies, biological pathways and compounds to form new drugs.
Output from GAINs will also allow further work to be performed using the NDD technology, the Oxfordshire-based company said, and can also be included in any subsequent work and commercial agreement.
Novo Nordisk, which is the world’s largest producer of insulin, has the option to license relevant IP generated under the collaboration.
The pharma industry has had limited success from population genomics studies to understand the genetic basis of disease, said Ray Barlow, e-Therapeutics chief executive.
“Using GAINs, we are now able to interrogate genomics data from patients with complex, polygenic disease and shed new light on important and novel biological pathways for particular groups of patients.
“GAINs has potentially broad application in therapeutic, diagnostic and biomarker fields. We only began to market GAINs to the industry two months ago and are encouraged by the interest already shown.”
ETX chares were up 9% to 3.1p in early trading on Thursday.