Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) and Zeiss have joined forces to improve drug discovery and early development of complex medicines by harnessing advanced microscopy solutions.

Advanced microscopy techniques have emerged as a foundation of biomedical research, capable of visualising cellular functions at very high resolution, while being minimally invasive to the cells or tissues of interest.

Incorporating advanced microscopy techniques into the early stages of the drug discovery process can provide invaluable information about drug activity within complex disease models.

Combining MDC’s experience in cell biology and drug discovery with Zeiss’ microscope instrumentation and image analysis capabilities, the partnership will drive the application of advanced microscopy workflows such as confocal, light sheet, multiphoton and super-resolution microscopy.

This activity will measure the interaction between drug molecules and biological systems, and develop assays specifically tailored to drug discovery.

As part of the ongoing collaboration, MDC and Zeiss will produce a live cell imaging and image analysis pipeline that can be deployed to assess novel drug delivery technologies and therapeutics, enabling innovators to advance their respective projects.

Cerevance – the clinical-stage drug discovery and development company focused on central nervous system diseases – has announced a multi-year strategic research collaboration with Merck (known as MSD outside the US and Canada) to identify novel targets for Alzheimer’s disease.

The link up will utilise Cerevance’s proprietary ‘Nuclear Enriched Transcript Sort sequencing’ (NETSseq) technology platform. The company will concurrently out-license one discovery-stage programme to Merck as part of the collaboration.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cerevance will receive a $25m upfront payment and is eligible to receive development and commercial milestone payments totalling around $1.1bn. This will be in addition to potential royalties on sales of approved products derived from the collaboration.

To date, Cerevance’s NETSseq technology platform has isolated and allowed for analysis of specific cell populations in thousands of post-mortem, healthy and diseased human brain tissue samples across a range of ages and brain regions.

These analyses of human brain tissue can expose biological pathways underlying neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases that would be difficult to see in animal models or differentiated human stem cells. As a result, Cerevance’s platform can reveal novel therapeutic targets that can be modulated to correct neural circuitry or slow the disease process.