12.01.08
Cognis Nutrition & Health, LaGrange, IL, has licensed an anti-obesity product candidate from the advanced discovery pipeline of functional food ingredients from Dortmund, Germany-based InterMed Discovery (IMD). Using IMD’s advanced discovery platform, scientists discovered the unique natural product and qualified its weight reducing properties through pre-clinical in vivo studies in several obesity models. As this ingredient has already shown initial safety and efficacy in animal studies, Cognis will now be able to set up human studies. This is expected to shorten the time-to-market significantly. Under the terms of the exclusive licensing agreement, Cognis is now taking over the lead to develop the product candidate and will be responsible for marketing any products resulting from the process. In return, IMD will receive an upfront payment and royalties for this molecule. The transaction is the first to follow the cooperation agreement signed by the two companies earlier this year.