A partner of choice for innovation
We collaborate with organisations worldwide to drive research into life-changing treatments for patients. From evaluating new molecules through to commercialising products, we are always on the lookout for high-potential partnerships.
Grünenthal is committed to maintaining its leadership in pain, while bringing innovations to pain-adjacent conditions. We look for companies that seek deep expertise to support progress for their R&D assets. And we work with organisations that want to divest their pain programmes or enter into licensing agreements.
We believe it is vital to work closely with universities and pioneers from academia, institutions and individuals that have a strong relationship with hospitals and can leverage their academic networks to access human tissue, proprietary models and biomarker research.
The pain R&D landscape has been transforming in the last few years. Innovation driven by smaller companies and academic institutions has led to breakthroughs that are making it possible to identify new targets and non-opioid mechanisms with the potential to address unmet medical needs associated with many pain conditions.
Several companies are now pursuing novel approaches like gene therapy or cell therapy that may provide better patient outcomes. Grünenthal, for example, is investigating novel modalities such as RNA therapeutics. These treatments have provided scientific breakthroughs outside of pain medicine and may have potential to act on pain targets.
Reaching beyond pain
Our scientists have outstanding capabilities and in-depth understanding of sensory biology and neuronal health – including neuronal hyperexcitability and hypoexcitability. Now, we leverage these capabilities in disease areas that share some common biological mechanisms and pathways with pain and can be addressed using our core competencies.
We are actively looking to expand our pipeline with assets addressing neurodegenerative diseases, epilepsy and pruritus. Whether for pain assets or adjacent indications, our partnering approach is flexible depending on the stage of the asset and the aspirations of our partner. It may involve licensing deals or an early research collaboration and access to our capabilities, co-development or co-commercialisation, a geographic-split deal for an asset in clinical development or an asset acquisition.
Finding the right partnership opportunities
We are seeking selective and potent molecules of any modality that have a strong target validation and address key pathways in our disease areas of interest. Since animal models can sometimes have low translatability to the clinic, we are interested in collaborations with companies that use more human-relevant models or cell systems and that are investigating credible biomarkers for a given indication.