Eisai Company Launches Ambitious 90-Scientist Collaborative R&D Unit in Boston Area
September 15, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Eisai Inc. , the U.S. subsidiary of Japan’s Eisai Co., Ltd., announced today that it is launching a research-and-discovery unit in the Boston area to focus on Alzheimer’s, cancer and autoimmune diseases. The new unit will be called the Eisai Andover Innovative Medicines (AiM) Institute and be located in Andover, Massachusetts.
AiM is part of Eisai’s 10-year EWAY Strategic Plan, which was announced in March. It will target three therapeutic areas, immuno-dementia, immuno-oncology, and autoimmune indications.
Within immuno-dementia, AiM will focus on a subset of dementia patients whose disease is driven by immune dysfunction. In immuno-oncology, it will focus on discovering precision immunotherapies that target myeloid lineage cells. A current product is E7046, an orally active EP4 receptor antagonist. And in autoimmune studies, it will look at toll-like receptors and prostaglandins to develop therapies for diseases like systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).
“The AiM Institute combines the focus, agility and innovative culture of a 90-person biotech-like organization with Eisai’s operational expertise and experience in bringing new medicines to patients,” said Nadeem Sawar, president of the Eisai AiM Institute, in a statement.
Endpoints News writes, “Eisai’s decision to focus on the Boston hub follows a trend already well defined by a group of pharma giants like Pfizer and Merck , which have been migrating R&D divisions into the global biotech cluster. The Japanese companies haven’t ignored that trend. Takeda recently announced its own plans to concentrate more work in the Boston hub as it downsizes in the UK and other spots, transferring 300 staffers to a CRO in the process.”
The AiM Institute is organized around what it is referring to as five “scientific engines.” They are:
•The Human Biology & Data Sciences Engine. This will focus on collecting and organization human biological data from a variety of sources to aid in developing drugs and identifying biomarkers.
•The Integrated Biology Engine. This will evaluate genetic variants in disease models and human cells to identify genetic variations and how those changes lead to disease.
•The Target Modulation Engine. This will develop experiments to target modulation mechanisms, and create target-specific assays.
•The Integrated Chemistry Engine. This will focus on identifying previously unknown and inaccessible areas of complex molecular spaces that might be used to develop new drug targets.
•The Imaging Center of Excellence. It will utilize MRI, CT, SPECT and PET scanning in addition to radiochemistry to support the research activities.
The Institute is also focused on collaboration with other research groups, which is partly the idea behind locating in the Boston area, one of the two biggest biotech hubs in the U.S., the other being the San Francisco Bay Area. The Institute states, “To achieve its mission, AiM has established and will continue to seek collaborations and strategic alliances with a broad spectrum of external scientific partners who complement its internal scientific expertise. … In addition, AiM scientists are proactively involved in several ‘pre-competitive’ research consortia, and are actively encouraged to contribute data to collaborations as well as publish research findings. To enable such collaboration, AiM has initiated a variety of flexible, innovative collaborative agreements concentrated on accelerating drug discovery.”