BioMed X, Gmbh announced the extension of its ongoing research collaboration with AbbVie Inc. This marks the launch of the first BioMed X Institute in the US, to be located in New Haven, Connecticut. Following a first joint research project on Alzheimer's disease at the BioMed X Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, the new US-based research collaboration will focus on immunology and tissue engineering. BioMed X was founded 10 years ago on the campus of one of Europe's most renowned universities in the life sciences and medicine, the University of Heidelberg, operating at the interface between academia and industry.

With its unique innovation model, BioMed X identifies the world's best early career academic scientists and relocates them to a BioMed X institute to solve a major challenge in biomedical research in close collaboration with a global pharmaceutical company. Industry's understanding of human disease biology is limited by the availability of relevant model systems that truly mirror the complexity of diseased human tissues, which hampers drug discovery and development. There are currently no good ex vivo models available involving human immune cells migrating through an organotypic human tissue microenvironment and recapitulating the molecular processes that typify human disease both spatially and temporally.

Such models would allow for the generation of new insights into human disease biology, the identification and validation of new drug targets, and the development of new therapeutic concepts for the treatment of immune-mediated inflammatory conditions. The current partnership with AbbVie is focused on the development of a new tissue engineering platform to produce complex human ex vivo models from primary human cells and tissues to study human tissue inflammation.