Endo Pharmaceuticals announces research collaborations on novel pain treatments and potential cancer treatments

Feb 10 2009

Endo Pharmaceuticals has announced that it has signed two research collaboration agreements to develop novel treatments for pain and to discover potential treatments for cancer.

The first collaboration, with Harvard University, is based upon a new pain-drug-delivery technique discovered by Clifford Woolf, M.D., Ph.D., Harvard Medical School's Richard J. Kitz Professor of Anaesthesia Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Bruce Bean, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School Professor of Neurobiology, that targets pain-sensing neurons without affecting motor neurons. Under the terms of the agreement, Endo will receive exclusive world-wide rights to the technology and be responsible for development and commercialization of any drug candidates discovered under the agreement.

The second agreement, with Aurigene Discovery Technologies Ltd., is a three-year collaboration to discover novel drug candidates to treat cancer. Aurigene will be responsible for all discovery and preclinical research activities, while Endo will be responsible for all clinical development and commercialization of drug candidates that advance into human testing. Endo will also provide research funding and milestone payments and receive worldwide rights to all intellectual property that results from this collaboration.

Ivan Gergel, M.D., Endo executive vice president of research and development, stated: "We are very excited to be pursuing promising new avenues of research in pain management as well as cancer treatment. We look forward to working with our colleagues at Harvard to explore the potential to block pain without affecting motor or other functions, and with the team at Aurigene to discover new oncology drug candidates."

http://www.endo.com/