CHDI
CHDI Foundation, Inc to carry out High Q Foundation’s research activities in Huntington’s disease
CHDI, Inc., recently renamed CHDI Foundation, Inc., and High Q Foundation, Inc. announced that CHDI has taken over primary responsibility for the types of Huntington’s disease research projects previously funded by High Q. CHDI will now be supporting the full gamut of Huntington’s disease research activities from basic discovery research through clinical development.
CHDI was originally established as a complementary non-profit organization to pursue a biotech approach to translating basic research findings from High Q and others into treatments for Huntington’s disease. High Q also supported clinical initiatives including the Huntington Study Group and the European Huntington’s Disease Network, networks of Huntington’s disease patients and clinicians, and other mission-related projects such as Science Commons.
The entire team at MRSSI, Inc., now called CHDI Management, Inc., will continue to provide administrative and management services to CHDI and other non-profit organizations researching Huntington’s disease.
CHDI’s goal is to support promising basic research and translate those findings into new treatments for people with Huntington’s disease, quickly. To achieve this goal, CHDI manages a diverse portfolio of research projects through a new virtual model that encourages scientific collaboration—one which more directly connects academic research, drug discovery and clinical development.
According to Robert Pacifici, CHDI Management’s Chief Scientific Officer, “this operating model benefits our only bottom line: time. It also bridges the gap between academic and industrial research pursuits that add costly delays to drug development efforts all along the drug pipeline.”
As a result of this reorganization, CHDI now supports research and clinical projects aimed at:
• Understanding HD pathogenesis
• Identifying and validating targets for therapeutic intervention
• Finding compounds that address relevant targets
• Developing cellular and animal models for target validation and drug discovery
• Developing lead compounds into potential drugs
• Designing tools to measure the progression of the disease
• Evaluating potential drugs in the clinic
• Providing the HD research community open access to pertinent materials and information
“The scale of our activities over the past few years has significantly increased,” explains Robi Blumenstein, President of CHDI Management. “We wanted to simplify and our organizational structure to ensure that all our efforts are focused on CHDI’s sole mission: to rapidly discover and develop drugs that delay or slow the progression of Huntington’s disease. These changes will improve the coordination of our efforts across the spectrum of our activities and allow us to better enable our research partners’ work to find treatments for this devastating disease.”