Evotec and Celgene Expand IPSC Collaboration to Include Additional Cell Lines

Evotec AG announced that the Company will receive a $ 6 m payment from Celgene following Celgene’s decision to expand the collaboration to include additional cell lines.

Evotec and Celgene initiated the collaboration in December 2016 to identify disease-modifying treatments for a broad range of neurodegenerative diseases. Currently approved drugs only offer short-term management of the patients’ symptoms and there is a huge unmet medical need for therapeutic modalities that slow down or reverse disease progression. This collaboration pursues an innovative approach to the discovery and development of novel medicines by leveraging Evotec’s unique human iPSC technology platform, which is one of the largest and most sophisticated platforms in the industry.

Dr Cord Dohrmann, Chief Scientific Officer of Evotec, commented: “We are extremely pleased with the progress we are making in our collaboration with Celgene which is driven by the conviction that patient-derived disease models are instrumental to improve the translatability of pre-clinical discovery efforts into clinic benefits.”