OSAKA -- Takeda Chemical Industries Ltd. said Friday it has reached a three-year agreement, involving an investment of $13.7 million, with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School of the United States, to cooperate in research and drug development for metabolic diseases.
Under the agreement, Takeda "will have an exclusive option to negotiate a license to new intellectual property derived from the collaboration," the drugmaker said.
Researchers of the two parties will help each other on "a number of projects to elucidate the biological mechanisms of diabetes and obesity, with the overall goal of discovering novel proteins and new drug targets implicated in these life-threatening diseases," it added.
Takeda joined hands with the University of Oxford in Britain last June in a similar manner for research and drug development for diabetes.