Crown Bioscience, a global drug discovery and development service company, and Horizon Discovery, a provider of research tools to support the development of personalized medicines, have signed an exclusive two year collaboration agreement. The relationship is a continuation of a previous collaboration between the two companies.

Horizon will share its X-MAN (X-Gene Mutant and Normal) isogenic cell lines with Crown to provide in vivo animal services to third parties. Crown will use Horizon’s cell lines to provide animal model development, study execution and business marketing to its clients. These high-quality disease models are crucial for generating ‘first-in-class’ patient-relevant targets while facilitating the development of novel oncology targets and early-stage drug discovery programs within the pharmaceutical industry.

By combining their drug discovery and translational research platforms, Crown Bioscience and Horizon Discovery will help their customers select and advance the highest quality drug candidates to clinical development. Both companies are ideally placed to help bring lead molecules based upon highly validated and novel drug models to clinic. In vitro and in vivo cell lines are available to clients who want to help validate new models and become early adopters, with complete access to new models available at the earliest possible phase.

“We are excited to continue working with Horizon through this new collaboration, and believe that the project will bring us closer to achieving a global leadership position in supporting oncology drug discovery programs,” said Jean-Pierre Wery, president of Crown Bioscience. “This is an important step on our path towards finding new answers to meet the urgent needs of our customers in their fight against cancer.”

Darrin Disley, CEO of Horizon Discovery, added, “The suite of in vivo models developed with Crown will ideally complement our extensive range of in vitro drug discovery tools and services. We are confident this partnership will yield some exciting results.”