Rheoscience A/S and Connexios India announce research collaboration to discover novel treatments for obesity and type 2 diabetes

Rheoscience A/S and Connexios India today announced an agreement to collaborate in discovery of novel therapies for obesity and diabetes. Rheoscience will bring to the collaboration its expertise in the discovery and validation of novel targets, as well as its preclinical testing capabilities, while Connexios will contribute its molecular network based approach to rapid screening of new molecules in cell based assays.

Commenting on the agreement Dr Philip Larsen, CEO- Rheoscience A/S said that the agreement is path breaking since it leverages the biological expertise in a Indian biotechnology company, unlike collaborations in the past that have focused in the chemistry skills in India. The complexity of biomolecular networks and the ability to model them are key to our ability to understand how new therapeutics could modulate cell function by modulating the entire network rather than just a single protein. We value this capability at Connexios and believe that it complements the more reductionist approaches of traditional drug discovery.

Dr Suri Venkatachalam, CEO-Connexios, said that the agreement helps Connexios get access to very early stage target discovery/evaluation capabilities at Rheoscience plus the ability at Rheoscience to put new compounds through a battery of well characterized animal models that best represent the human disease. Rheoscience A/S has also, over the years, created new proprietary knowledge of targets relevant to obesity and diabetes that would be an excellent jump-start to the collaboration.

About Connexios
Connexios Life Sciences (http://www.connexios.com/) is a systems biology based drug discovery company founded by an interdisciplinary group of scientists in Bangalore, India. The drug discovery platform of Connexios comprises of a set of in-vitro and in-silico pharmacological screens derived through a systems biology approach. Such a cell based systems pharmacology approach enables Connexios to comprehensively characterize drug candidates for their efficacy, ADME and Tox, at an early stage. This approach serves to reduce cycle time and costs and increase the efficiency of downstream animal-based studies leading up to clinical development. Connexios is developing an internal pipeline of molecules using this discovery platform.


About Rheoscience A/S
Rheoscience (http://www.rheoscience.com) is an emerging leader in research on obesity and metabolic disorders. Rheoscience was established in Copenhagen, Denmark in March 2002 as a spin-off from the Center for Clinical and Basic Research A/S (CCBR). Apart from providing research services focused on the preclinical validation of targets and the evaluation of NCEs in preclinical models of obesity and diabetes, Rheoscience also undertakes independent discovery and validation of novel targets in these therapeutic areas. Rheoscience seeks to grow through strategic partnerships with other pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that have complementary resources.