Pfizer links with academia for obesity and diabetes research

As part of a new collaboration, the USA's Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute at Lake Nona revealed it is working with USA-based Pfizer  NYSE: PFE), still the world’s largest drugmaker by sales, to identify new therapeutic targets for preventing and treating complications of obesity and diabetes.

The team will utilize novel screening tools including systems-biology approaches and technologies developed at the Institute with the aim of discovering new therapeutic strategies for reducing insulin resistance in obesity and diabetes.

Under the three-year agreement, multi-disciplinary teams from Sanford-Burnham and Pfizer will collaborate to identify and validate new targets for drug discovery. The collaboration combines Sanford’s expertise in fundamental disease biology and muscle metabolism with Pfizer’s expertise in drug discovery. Investigators will utilize the Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics to screen for new relevant targets using investigational compounds from Pfizer as well as evaluate compounds previously identified from the NIH chemical library.