Trophos and CHDI Extend Partnership

Trophos SA and CHDI, Inc. have announced the extension of 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 optimize the promising compounds from three chemical series to enable preclinical testing in models relevant to HD pathology.

Trophos retains the right to develop and commercialize 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," said Robert Pacifici, CSO at CHDI.

"We look forward to our continued partnership with Trophos to explore the progression of compounds as they are identified."

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

"Access to the network of academic and clinical Huntington disease experts, along with the enabling drug development technologies CHDI has assembled, will facilitate the rapid translation of our most promising compounds into drug candidates for future clinical development."