• Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute inked a collaboration with Pfizer Inc., of New York, to identify therapeutic targets to prevent and treat complications of obesity and diabetes. Under the three-year agreement, multidisciplinary teams from the organizations will collaborate to identify and validate new targets for drug discovery, combining Sanford-Burnham's expertise in disease biology and muscle metabolism with Pfizer's expertise in drug discovery. Once screening identifies compounds of interest, scientists from the organizations will collaborate to characterize those compounds and seek to understand their mechanism of action. Those compounds then will be used as probes to identify therapeutic targets for diabetes. Financial terms were not disclosed.