Trophos and CHDI extend partnership for Huntington disease

Trophos, a biopharmaceutical company who specialises in the discovery and development of drugs for neurodegenerative diseases, and CHDI have extended a strategic collaboration to discover and develop drugs for Huntington disease.

The development program builds upon a collaboration to identify compounds that confer a survival benefit on primary striatal neurons subjected to Huntington-mediated toxicity in assays enabled by the proprietary screening platform, developed at Trophos. Loss of striatal neurons is considered an important factor in the pathogenesis of Huntington disease.

During the collaboration, Trophos and CHDI will seek to optimise the most promising compounds from three chemical series to enable preclinical testing in models relevant to HD pathology. Trophos retains the right to develop and commercialise the clinical candidates arising from the program as therapeutics for HD.

'Trophos' primary neuronal cell screening platform represents an important part of CHDI's portfolio. We look forward to our continued partnership with Trophos to explore the progression of compounds as they are identified,' said Robert Pacifici, chief scientific officer at CHDI.

Rebecca Pruss, cso at Trophos, said: 'We are pleased that CHDI has chosen to continue to support the chemical optimisation and pharmacological profiling of these three families of molecules identified using the proprietary neuronal cell screening platform developed at Trophos'.