Boehringer Ingelheim and Circuit Therapeutics have entered into a research collaboration agreement for the discovery of new ways of treating psychiatric disorders. Circuit Therapeutics provides an innovative platform that allows the identification and characterization of drug targets from brain circuits involved in normal and pathological behaviors.

Circuit Therapeutics’ key technology, optogenetics, allows the control of individual nerve cells and circuits within the brain, enabling their functional identification and characterization. The combination of optogenetics and molecular technologies helps to identify novel drug targets and approaches for drug development. The new insights enabled by circuit-based analysis provide fundamentally differentiated approaches to understanding and treating brain disorders, which otherwise have been difficult to address.

Further details of the three-year agreement have not been disclosed.