Boehringer Ingelheim has formed new collaborations with four scientific partnersforresearch and development of nl therapeutic approaches for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Massachusetts General Hospital, Scripps Research Institute, and Weill Cornell Medicine. These collaborations aim to identify and validate potential new therapeutic targets as well as identify biomarkers that offer the potential to address the significant unmet medical needs of patients with IBD such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.

Boehringer Ingelheim scientists will work hand-in-hand with experts at the respective institutions to enhance the speed of research and to foster information sharing. The company will also provide scientific and technology support as well as research funding to the four scientific partners.

With the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, the joint research teams from Mount Sinai and BI will collaborate to interrogate both adaptive and innate immune response mechanisms that may be unique to both Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. This research is expected to provide new insights into IBD pathogenesis and offers unique opportunities for target discovery and biomarker validation.

With Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, Boehringer Ingelheim's ongoing collaboration with Dr. Frederick Ausubel will leverage high-throughput chemical and genetic screening capabilities to uncover new mechanisms at the host-environment interface that are compromised in patients with IBD.

With the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, the objective of Boehringer Ingelheim's collaboration with Dr. Dennis Wolan is to gain a deeper understanding of the role of specific bacterial enzymes in the onset of ulcerative colitis. Dr. Wolan's research effort will focus on utiliszng biophysical, proteomic, and chemical biology methods to identify new protein targets involved in the pathology of ulcerative colitis.

With the Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, the research collaboration with Dr. David Artis and Dr. Gregory Sonnenberg at the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in IBD at Weill Cornell Medicine will jointly pursue an integrated pre-clinical and translational research program related to certain defined cellular processes and targets that regulate the maintenance of the gut mucosal barrier in healthy and IBD-affected patients. This work is anticipated to lead to the discovery and validation of new therapeutic modalities and biomarker approaches for IBD.

Source: Boehringer Ingelheim