Lundbeck to enter a partnership with Lieber Institute

Danish CNS specialist Lundbeck (LUND: CO), together with a number of other companies, is now entering into a collaboration with the USA-based Lieber Institute for Brain Development (LIBD), which has the world's largest collection of human brains from patients with psychiatric disorders.

This collaboration, for which no financial terms were disclosed, will enable Lundbeck's researchers to take decisive steps towards new and better treatment of the debilitating and life-long brain disease that is schizophrenia. The accord follows an earlier collaboration with Anglo-Swedish drug major AstraZeneca’s (LSE: AZN) collaboration with the Lieber Institute to use genetics and stem cell biology to discover new drugs for neuropsychiatric and neuro-developmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia (The Pharma Letter January 4).

This joint project provides a unique opportunity to investigate how genes affect brain development and disorders of the brain. Based on knowledge of the biology of brain disease, researchers will simply be able to look at the brains of both sick and healthy individuals and establish a nuanced picture of how the biology of the disease can be expressed, said Lundbeck.