The Ice Bucket Challenge initiated by the ALS association generated a lot of media attention for ALS disease during the past year and world-wide awareness for ALS.
However, sadly there is still no cure available for this devastating neurodegenerative disease. Patients and their families anxiously await much-needed effective treatments.

Evotec’s scientists have accepted the ALS challenge in two ways: on the one hand through buckets of ice water and on the other hand by asking ourselves the question how we could contribute to identifying effective treatments for ALS. We are convinced that this challenging task requires a novel innovative drug discovery approach. In a strategic partnership with the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, our ambitious goal is to leverage patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells with Evotec’s drug discovery infrastructure and expertise to identify compounds that will have therapeutic value for this life threatening disease.

This 6th DDup (Drug Discovery Update) issue highlights the details of Evotec’s collaboration with Dr Lee Rubin and Dr Kevin Eggan from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute that aims to accelerate drug discovery for ALS. Despite its great potential for more high throughput screenable disease relevant models the use of pluripotent stem cell models in the drug discovery process has just begun. Together with Kevin and Lee, Evotec embarked on a systematic screening approach to identify and investigate novel mechanisms and targets for the treatment of ALS. Together with multi-scale predictive modelling, induced pluripotent stem cells will not only enable insights into disease mechanisms but provide drug screening paradigms that more faithfully recapitulate human disease biology.

Download the publication to learn more about motor neuron diseases, our collaboration with Harvard to accelerate drug discovery for ALS including an interview with Dr Lee Rubin and Dr Kevin Eggan, and more in this Drug Discovery Update #6.