Evotec SE and Bristol-Myers Squibb have expand their collaboration to include additional cell lines, triggering a $6 million payment from BMS.
Evotec and Celgene, a Bristol-Myers Squibb company, initiated the collaboration in December 2016 to identify disease-modifying treatments for a broad range of neurodegenerative diseases with unmet medical need. This collaboration uses an innovative approach to the discovery and development of novel medicines by leveraging several of Evotec's technology platforms in conjunction with the human iPSC based platform, which is one of the largest and most sophisticated platforms in the industry. The iPSC partnership between BMS and Evotec has already been expanded with additional cell lines several times.
Dr. Cord Dohrmann, chief scientific officer of Evotec, said, "We are very pleased about this latest expansion of our iPSC-alliance with Bristol-Myers Squibb. Patient-derived disease models will be instrumental to improving the translatability of pre-clinical discovery efforts into clinical benefits and we are proud to leverage our proprietary iPSC platform together with Bristol-Myers Squibb for the benefit of the patients."