Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica and Crown Bioscience Reach landmark agreement

Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Crown Bioscience, have reached an agreement to form a strategic collaboration focused on translational oncology and to join forces to build a mouse clinical trial (MCT) centre at Crown Taicang campus, Taicang, Jiangsu province, China –SIMM-Crown mouse clinical trial centre, or SCMC.

This strategic partnership aims at building the world first and largest mouse clinical centre featuring the largest and most advanced translational oncology platforms with fully annotated collections of patient derived xenograft (PDX) models. The immediate focus of the centre will be to combine the existing model collections of both organisations (approaching a thousand) and build several thousand more new models focusing on major Asian cancer types, including liver (HCC), lung (NSCLC), gastric (GC) and colorectal (CRC) cancers.

With this joint effort, the centre will dramatically expand the combined operational capacity to support global translational oncology efforts, particularly mouse clinical trial (HuTrial platform) or co-trial, supporting cancer research communities, cancer hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry. It will also utilise the strength of both organisations to advance PDX-based translational oncology platforms, to advance our knowledge of cancer biology and to de-risk drug development. In particular, the centre will be able to help accelerate the development of SIMM’s pipeline of novel and rich targeted oncology drug candidates by leveraging Crown’s advanced oncology discovery and translational capabilities, including proprietary HuPrime1.0, 2.0, 3.0, HuKemia, HuTrial, HuSignature platforms.

The signing of the agreement was held at SIMM headquarter in Shanghai where Dr Jian Ding, Director General, SIMM, a renowned cancer pharmacologist, a member of Chinese Academy of Engineering, and the Centre’s first President, represented SIMM and Dr Jean-Pierre Wery, Crown’s President represented Crown Bioscience.

At the signing ceremony, Dr Ding stated, “As the largest government-founded research institute focusing on drug development in China, SIMM aims at inventing more world-class drugs to benefit patients in China and worldwide. The premium oncology translational research platform based on PDX models will enable us to have a better understanding of our candidate drugs and to stratify the responsive subgroup patients for personalised therapy. SIMM is excited about the opportunity of building up a first class translation oncology center together with Crown to accelerate the development of precision medicines for oncology applications.”

Dr Wery commented at the ceremony, “Crown plays a leading role in providing cutting-edge translational platforms and cost effective drug discovery solutions for almost all top pharmaceutical companies worldwide. Crown is happy to partner with SIMM, the premium drug discovery CAS institute in China, to offer the world with first class translational oncology services, and ultimately benefit cancer patients all around the world. This centre will further strengthen Crown’s leading position as the oncology discovery and translational medicine partner in the global market.”

EP News Bureau – Mumbai