Rhenovia signs €500K collaboration with France’s Muscular Dystrophy Association

Rhenovia Pharma, a specialist in central and peripheral nervous system diseases, has signed a two-year €500,000 strategic partnership agreement with the French Muscular Dystrophy Association (Association Française contre les Myopathies – AFM). 

The aim is speeding up the development and validation of Rhenovia’s technology for simulating neuronal transmission. This will give AFM access to a faster approach for discovering and developing new treatments for rare neurodegenerative diseases, and will also be relevant to more common neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. 

Rhenovia’s is developing a neuronal transmission biosimulation platform which it says is currently the most sophisticated simulation technology for use in drug discovery in this field. It can also be applied to improve the efficacy and/or the side-effect profiles of existing medicines and enables drug candidates sidelined by the pharmaceutical industry to be repurposed. 

The Rhenovia platform can reproduce experimental results on a computer and, conversely, predict the effects of medicines whose efficacy can then be confirmed experimentally. This reduces the need for animal testing whilst improves the success rate for drug candidates.

The collaboration with AFM will allow Rhenovia to extend the scope of its biosimulation platform to peripheral nervous system diseases in general, and diseases connected with a change in muscular plaque, such as muscular dystrophy, lateral amyotrophic sclerosis and multiple sclerosis, in particular.

“Rhenovia is delighted to combine its efforts with those of the AFM, a leading player on the French research scene, especially in the area of research into treatments for rare nervous system diseases and genetic muscular diseases,” said the chairman and CEO of Rhenovia Pharma, Serge Bischoff. “Our technology will enable research laboratories associated with the AFM to improve their efficiency and optimise their research costs. This agreement is a perfect illustration of the relevance and strength of our technology.”

AFM’s scientific director, Dr. Serge Braun, said the agreement with Rhenovia, “Will enable us to speed up some of our research programmes and open up new avenues of research for rare diseases of the central and peripheral nervous system [...] These advances will also benefit more common neurodegenerative diseases.”