Evotec receives $2.5M grant for teratogenicity platform

Evotec announced that the company has received a $ 2.5M grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for its teratogenicity platform, and joins the foundation’s prestigious Global Health Discovery Collaboratory, or GHDC, a network of researchers, centers of excellence, and technology platforms working together to accelerate the discovery and translation of global health interventions. Potential teratogenicity of drug candidates, i.e., their ability to cause defects in a developing foetus, is usually assessed very late in the drug discovery process using time- and cost-intensive in vivo models. Using human induced pluripotent stem cell, or iPSC, technology, Evotec has developed an in vitro teratogenicity platform with high-throughput capability, which enables cost effective de-risking of drug candidates early in the drug discovery process. The grant provides GHDC members receiving funding from the foundation access to Evotec’s high-throughput teratogenicity platform at no extra cost.