DUBLIN, Ireland - Danish neuropharmaceutical firm NeuroSearch A/S entered an alliance with Abbott Laboratories to discover and develop ion channel modulators for diseases of the central and peripheral nervous systems.

Abbott, of Abbott Park, Ill., will have exclusive worldwide rights to any compounds that emerge from the program. NeuroSearch will receive royalties on eventual drug sales, plus up to US$17 million for each compound that successfully undergoes an NDA, with milestone payments triggered at each successive clinical trial stage. Abbott is also funding the research and development work at both companies and has already made its first payment to the Danish firm, said NeuroSearch President and CEO Jxrgen Buus Lassen. NeuroSearch has committed 11 staffers to the program, while Abbott has allocated a further 25.

The partners did not divulge their specific disease or drug targets, but Lassen said they would select their first development candidate by the middle of this year. NeuroSearch already has a number of candidates with good initial efficacy and safety profiles, but it needs to collect more pharmacokinetic data, he said.

The program will draw on Neuropatch, NeuroSearch's semi-automated proprietary patch-clamp technology for secondary screening of compounds for activity against ion channels, a category of cell membrane proteins that mediate the effects of diverse molecular signals in nerve tissues.

NeuroSearch, of Ballerup, Denmark, is also contributing in vivo pharmacological disease models and a library of up to 400 compounds, some of which have already undergone primary screening, said Lassen.

The Abbott agreement is in line with NeuroSearch's business plan and, therefore, will not have any impact on its anticipated loss of DKK50 million in the current fiscal year. NeuroSearch ended last year with losses of around DKK110 million, DKK30 million higher than its initial forecast. Two setbacks contributed to this - the company's failure to finalize before year's end a license agreement for NS2389, its candidate depression treatment, which is in Phase II clinical trials, and the withdrawal by Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, of New York, from an agreement to co-develop NeuroSearch's anti-Parkinson's drug brasofensine.