Boehringer Ingelheim, GWT and the Department of Medicine of the TU Dresden have signed a research collaboration agreement to develop new insights into the causes of diabetes and the link between excessive blood glucose, the hallmark of diabetes, and the serious complications of the disease that can affect many organ functions.

As partners, Boehringer Ingelheim, GWT and the TU Dresden will work together to enhance the knowledge of the disease to ultimately enable the discovery and development of innovative therapies that will treat these diseases more effectively. The five-year industry-academia collaboration strengthens Boehringer Ingelheim’s efforts to translate basic scientific findings into more effective treatments of human diseases.

The partners have initially defined six research projects bridging pre-clinical findings in the laboratory or from investigational treatments with the corresponding clinical situation with patients. The projects range from the exploration of causes for the destruction of insulin-producing beta cells to the cells and molecules triggering diabetic complications in organs such as the eye (diabetic retinopathy), which can lead to blindness, kidney (nephropathy), nerves (neuropathy) or skin (ulcerations).

Results from these studies may help to design new medicines for clinical testing, or to better understand how drug candidates can be tested with biomarkers and ultimately used in an optimal way for those patients most likely to show clinical benefit.

The GWT-TUD is a company of the TUDAG-Group, the Technische Universität Dresden. It is a service provider for knowledge and technology transfers and creates solutions for concrete projects and questions raised in R&D for clients in the industry.

The Dresden Diabetes Research Center in Germany, led by Professor Stefan Bornstein, treats 30,000 patients annually. In cooperation with the Paul-Langerhans-Institut at the Dresden University hospital, new therapies are explored.