Sciwind Biosciences, a China-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, and SynerK, a US-based RNAi therapeutics discovery and development company, announced on Monday that they have signed a research collaboration agreement to jointly discover and develop new therapeutics based on small interfering RNA (siRNA) technology intended to treat liver and metabolic diseases marked by unmet medical requirements.

The firms said that they intend to integrate their expertise in the discovery and development of innovative therapies against important human diseases. They are working together to find new therapeutic targets that play critical roles in disease biology for a wide range of liver and metabolic diseases and to discover and produce novel siRNA therapeutics against these targets.

Dr Weidong Zhong, Sciwind Biosciences president, said, 'We are very pleased to have the opportunity to work with the SynerK team and utilise SynerK's proprietary siRNA technology platform to discover new therapies to treat chronic diseases for which effective treatments are still urgently needed. This research partnership will provide exciting opportunities for both companies to explore new disease targets or targets that have not been successfully modulated through conventional therapeutic modalities, such as protein or small molecule drugs.'