Servier and Vernalis are have achieved two research milestones and one clinical milestone in their oncology drug discovery collaboration.
Servier is an international pharmaceutical company governed by a non- profit foundation and Vernalis is a commercial-stage pharmaceutical company with expertise in drug development.
Vernalis and Servier's partnership has been running for ten years. Their collaboration takes advantage of Vernalis' fragment and structure-based drug discovery platform and of Servier's expertise in medicinal chemistry, cancer biology and pharmacology.
The collaboration focuses on complicated molecular targets, some of which, like Mcl1, were considered as undruggable until recently.
The aforementioned clinical milestone regards the first treatment of the first patient with a selective Mcl1 inhibitor. The discovery and characterisation of this family of Mcl1 inhibitors were recently published in Nature.
The worldwide clinical development of this promising drug candidate is being undertaken by Servier in collaboration with Novartis.
The two research milestones relate to success in early drug discovery against Mcl1 and another undisclosed target.
