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BioMed X has announced the successful completion of their first research collaboration project with AbbVie in the field of tau-mediated neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease. BioMed X received a milestone payment and the results of the project were transferred to AbbVie.

The BioMed X team successfully developed research tools to assess disease-associated post-translational modification signatures of the tau protein in the brains and cerebrospinal fluids of sporadic Alzheimer’s patients and identified new signatures which might be useful for drug discovery and as early biomarkers of the disease.

“We are very excited to see that our research sponsor AbbVie decided to acquire the results of our joint project,” says Dr. Christian Tidona, founder and Managing Director of BioMed X. “This clearly demonstrates that our new innovation model delivers high-quality research results which contribute to the development pipelines of our pharma partners.”

The project was launched in 2015 as a global call for research proposals using BioMed X’s proprietary crowdsourcing platform. The call resulted in over 400 applications from more than 60 different countries. Based on their scientific track record and the originality of their project proposals, the 15 top candidates were invited to a five day innovation boot camp in Heidelberg. The winner of the boot camp was Dr. Dagmar Ehrnhöfer, an early-career neuroscientist who joined BioMed X for a four-year research fellowship from Michael Hayden’s laboratory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Following her project at BioMed X, Dr. Ehrnhöfer will continue her career as a principal research scientist at AbbVie.

“AbbVie was impressed with the quality of the science that was performed under the BioMed X collaboration,” says Dr. Eric Karran, Vice President, Neuroscience Research, AbbVie. “AbbVie plans to evaluate the findings from this tau program into our ongoing work in neuroscience.”

About BioMed X Innovation Center

The BioMed X Innovation Center is an exciting new collaboration model at the interface between academia and industry. At the center, distinguished early-career scientists recruited from all over the world work jointly on novel pre-clinical research projects in the fields of biomedicine, molecular biology, cell biology and diagnostics. These interdisciplinary project teams conduct outstanding biomedical research in an open-innovation lab facility on the campus of the University of Heidelberg, under the guidance of experienced mentors from academia and industry, while expanding their scientific network and receiving training in entrepreneurship and leadership. Each team is typically sponsored by a corporate pharmaceutical partner of BioMed X. After a fully funded project term, successful projects are internalized into the development pipeline of the respective pharma partner. BioMed X collaborates with pharma companies such as AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim, Janssen, Merck and Roche.

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