Sanford-Burnham, Florida Hospital and Takeda Pharmaceutical have formed a collaboration to investigate new therapies for obesity, a growing worldwide health problem. The partnership leverages the three organizations’ strengths in basic biomedical research, clinical research and drug development to identify obesity-related biomarkers and other targets with therapeutic potential.“There is an epidemic of obesity in the U.S.; two-thirds of Americans are now overweight or obese. These staggering statistics serve as a call for decisive action, including innovative bench-to-bedside translational research,” says Dr. Steven R. Smith, scientific director of the Florida Hospital-Sanford-Burnham Translational Research Institute for Metabolism and Diabetes (TRI). “This partnership with Takeda, TRI and Sanford-Burnham represents a major milestone in the quest for a better understanding of obesity as a disease and a pathway forward for the development of safe and effective therapies.”

The partnership is the first corporate-sponsored research undertaken jointly by Sanford-Burnham at Lake Nona and the TRI.  Advanced technologies, including genomic and metabolite profiling, will be used to identify metabolic signatures, genes and pathways that could be used as biomarkers and novel drug targets. The hope is to develop more personalized treatments for obesity and its complications.

“This research partnership is a collaborative model that capitalizes on the synergistic expertise of each group and provides all partners with access to our Cardiometabolic Phenotyping, Metabolomics and Genomics technology cores,” said Dr.  Daniel P. Kelly, scientific director, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute at Lake Nona. “It offers much promise for expediting new drug candidates into Takeda’s development pipeline.”

Read more about this new collaboration at the Los Angeles Times or listen to the story on WMFE, Orlando’s public radio station.