Dementia Consortium signs new pharmaceutical partner AbbVie

London, UK, North Chicago USA, 16 February 2016:  The Dementia Consortium has welcomed AbbVie as new pharmaceutical partner, joining medical research charity MRC Technology, Alzheimer’s Research UK, the UK’s leading dementia research charity, and pharmaceutical companies Astex, Eisai and Lilly.

The Consortium is a global £4m collaboration between academia, charity and the private sector which aims to find new drug treatments for dementia. This combination of expertise is being used to drive early stage drug discovery programmes against promising academic targets for neurodegenerative disease.

AbbVie brings additional expertise, resources and capital to the Consortium, allowing more projects to be funded and progressed towards patient benefit.

Dr Jim Summers, Vice-President of Neuroscience Discovery Research at AbbVie said:

“We are pleased to be part of the Dementia Consortium. This innovative approach to validating new drug targets is an important component of our strategy to develop new therapies to treat neurodegenerative diseases.”

Dr Simon Ridley, Director of Research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said:

“It’s a very positive development to have AbbVie join the Dementia Consortium, strengthening our ability to accelerate the search for effective new treatments for dementia. We know that in order to find new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, we need to explore as many different approaches as possible, and our growing range of Pharma partnerships will ensure we can continue to invest in a diverse range of projects to build drug discovery pipelines.”

To date, the Consortium has awarded over £1.5m to early stage drug discovery efforts for neurodegenerative diseases, including projects that target the immune system in a bid to halt nerve cell damage in Alzheimer’s and a project studying targeting TDP-43 aggregation in frontotemporal dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

For further information about the consortium please visit http://www.dementiaconsortium.org/.