SIMM and Crown Bioscience Reach Landmark Agreement

Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Crown Bioscience, Inc., have announced that they have reached an agreement to form a strategic collaboration focused on translational oncology and to join forces to build a mouse clinical trial (MCT) center at Crown Taicang campus, Taicang, Jiangsu province, China --SIMM-Crown Mouse Clinical Trial Center, or SCMC.

This strategic partnership aims at building the world first and largest mouse clinical center featuring the largest and most advanced translational oncology platforms with fully annotated collections of patient derived xenograft (PDX) models.

The immediate focus of the Center will be to combine the existing model collections of both organizations (approaching a thousand) and build several thousand more new models focusing on major Asian cancer types, including liver (HCC), lung (NSCLC), gastric (GC) and colorectal (CRC) cancers.

With this joint effort, the Center will dramatically expand the combined operational capacity to support global translational oncology efforts, particularly mouse clinical trial (HuTrial™ platform) or co-trial, supporting cancer research communities, cancer hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry.

It will also utilize the strength of both organizations to advance PDX based translational oncology platforms, to advance our knowledge of cancer biology and to de-risk drug development.

In particular, the Center will be able to help accelerate the development of SIMM’s pipeline of novel and rich targeted oncology drug candidates by leveraging Crown’s advanced oncology discovery and translational capabilities, including proprietary HuPrime®1.0, 2.0, 3.0, HuKemia®, HuTrial™, HuSignature™ platforms.

The signing of the agreement was held at SIMM headquarter in Shanghai, China, where Dr. Jian Ding, Director General of SIMM, a renowned cancer pharmacologist, a member of Chinese Academy of Engineering, and the Center’s first President, represented SIMM and Dr. Jean-Pierre Wery, Crown’s President represented Crown Bioscience.

At the signing ceremony, Dr. Ding stated: “As the largest government-founded research institute focusing on drug development in China, SIMM aims at inventing more world-class drugs to benefit patients in China and worldwide. The premium oncology translational research platform based on PDX models will enable us to have a better understanding of our candidate drugs and to stratify the responsive subgroup patients for personalized therapy. SIMM is excited about the opportunity of building up a first class translation oncology center together with Crown to accelerate the development of precision medicines for oncology applications.”

Dr. Wery commented at the ceremony: “Crown plays a leading role in providing cutting-edge translational platforms and cost effective drug discovery solutions for almost all top pharmaceutical companies worldwide. Crown is very happy to partner with SIMM, the premium drug discovery CAS institute in China, to offer the world with first class translational oncology services, and ultimately benefit cancer patients all around the world. This center will further strengthen Crown’s leading position as the oncology discovery and translational medicine partner in the global market”.