Marquette, pharmaceutical firm AviMed sign licensing agreement
August 15th, 2010
Second university start-up is developing drugs for the treatment of schizophrenia
MILWAUKEE Marquette University has completed a licensing agreement with AviMed Pharmaceuticals, LLC, a Milwaukee-based company. Based on 10 years of research into a novel brain mechanism involved in schizophrenia, AviMed is using proprietary technologies to develop pharmaceutical therapies to treat the psychiatric disease.
AviMed was founded by two Marquette professors, Behnam Ghasemzadeh, associate professor of biomedical sciences and the company’s president and chief scientific officer, and Daniel Sem, associate professor of chemistry who serves as AviMed’s CEO.
Ghasemzadeh studied the novel brain mechanism early in his research career and recognized its involvement in the behaviors of schizophrenia. Ghasemzadeh explains: “This brain mechanism has unique properties that make it a promising target for the treatment of neurological disorders including schizophrenia.” Targeting this brain mechanism, he and Sem are now re-engineering existing pharmaceutical compounds that will attempt to counteract the symptoms of this debilitating psychiatric disease that affects more than 2.4 million people in the U.S.
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Tags: Agreement, Licensing Agreement