Partnership between KI and Novo Nordisk focusing on target & biomarker discovery in Atherosclerosis

Under the terms and conditions of this umbrella agreement, KI and Novo Nordisk are together working on two agreed projects founded on discovery of novel molecular targets in atherosclerosis utilizing human biomaterial and led by Ulf Hedin and Ljubica Matic at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery.

Project 1 is dedicated to creating an integrated and clustered information resource that covers multi-omic studies (genetics/genomics, proteomics and metabolomics) in a large patient sample collection and jointly generate hypotheses for novel disease relevant biology. The project is developing new workflows for integrating multi-omics data to discover drug targets and biomarkers to diagnose and treat human disease.

Project 2 is designed to further explore and validate identified and agreed targets and pathways using fit for purpose models and resources. Specificity, efficacy and pharmacokinetics of identified targets are assessed as part of this project.

A third project covered by this umbrella agreement is led by PI Oliver Söhnlein at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology and aims to establish the relevance of chronobiology in human atherosclerosis and how this potentially plays a role in treatment of the disease.

The collaboration will run for an initial three-year period and the research groups at KI will cooperate with the Translational Science & Cardiorenal departments and the Bioinformatics and Data mining departments at Novo Nordisk.