IRBM Extends Peptide Therapeutics Collaboration with Merck & Co. Inc. Rahway NJ USA

Rome, Italy – IRBM, an innovative contract research organization, today announced it has signed a new agreement with Merck & Co. Inc., Rahway NJ USA, known as MSD outside the USA and Canada, to continue their collaboration in the peptide therapeutics area.

“The success of this collaboration is reflected by the outstanding achievements in the delivery of orally available peptide candidates,” said Elisabetta Bianchi, Senior Director of Peptide Chemistry at IRBM. “We are thrilled to continue this collaboration as part of our mission to advance impactful agents into the clinic.”

IRBM’s Chief Science Officer Carlo Toniatti said “We are immensely proud to combine IRBM’s first-class scientific expertise in peptide design and synthesis with Merck & Co. Inc.’s exceptional drug development capabilities with a focus on delivering innovative therapies to patients in need”.

“At MSD, we continue to evaluate the opportunities for peptide-based therapeutic candidates across multiple indications,” said Rob Garbaccio, Vice President, Head of Discovery Chemistry at MSD Research Laboratories. “We look forward to continuing our productive collaboration with our colleagues at IRBM in this compelling area of research.”

In recent years, significant advances have been made in peptide discovery through the well-established phage and mRNA display platforms and with major progress achieved for half-life extension strategies and the use of formulation enhancers to support oral route administration. The collaboration has taken advantage of these novel technologies to develop peptide candidates that progress into the clinic.

IRBM has built broad expertise in peptide drug development. The established integrated platform covers the entire range of activities required to discover and develop novel peptide hits into optimized leads. The delivery of safe and effective candidate peptide drugs is supported by the use of phage display peptide libraries for hit identification, advanced synthetic strategies from macrocycles to proteins, molecular design and engineering, structural biology, biochemical, biophysical and cell-based assay to enable structural activity relationship studies as well as in vitro and in vivo ADME studies.