CRO Charles River International, based in Wilmington, Mass., and the CHDI Foundation, a U.S., privately-funded, nonprofit, biomedical research organization, have extended an ongoing collaboration for an additional five years through 2019. The collaboration, which began in 2005, is focused on discovering novel drugs for Huntington's disease.

Over the course of this nine-year relationship, CHDI has expanded the collaboration with Charles River's early discovery division due to its neuroscience experience and comprehensive integrated drug discovery capability. Charles River provides a full range of research activities and experience in the neuroscience area for CHDI, including integrated biology and chemistry capabilities, complex primary neuronal assay development, high-content screening, fragment-based screening, computational chemistry, ADME/PK and protein crystallography.

"We have successfully collaborated with CHDI across a range of projects and we look forward to helping the foundation successfully accomplish its goal to develop drugs that will slow the progression of Huntington's disease and provide meaningful clinical benefit to patients as quickly as possible," said David Smith, corporate senior vice president, global discovery services, Charles River. "Our shared passion to stop Huntington's disease is a strong foundation for this relationship. We are committed to making the next five years of this relationship as productive as the first nine."

"CHDI selects the best partners from the academic, biopharmaceutical and contract research sectors to execute its drug discovery and development portfolio. Charles River's early drug discovery team continues to deliver expert technologies and deep scientific expertise to enable our drug discovery research in the fight against Huntington's disease," said Dr. Robert Pacifici, chief scientific officer at CHDI.

On March 31, Charles River acquired BioFocus and its sister company, Argenta. As a result of the addition of the BioFocus and Argenta early discovery capabilities, Charles River now provides clients with a unique portfolio of integrated in vitro and in vivo capabilities from target identification through preclinical development.