28 October 2024
Research group of Christian Wolfrum at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at the ETH Zurich.
Christian Wolfrum is Vice President of Research and Full Professor of the Institute of Food Nutrition and Health at the ETH Zurich. The opnMe team had the chance to speak with Christian Wolfrum who collaborates with Boehringer Ingelheim through one of their previous opn2EXPERTS calls.
opnMe: What role did opnMe play in the establishment of your partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim?
Christian Wolfrum: Unlike some years back when academia and industry represented two extremes of biomedical research, in recent times, a very productive collaboration and two-way dialogue are emerging. Boehringer Ingelheim has been at the forefront of this renaissance with opnMe and its opn2EXPERTS pillar. As a research group at ETH Zurich, we are exploring the depot specialization and systemic functions of adipose tissue and its molecular determinants in regulating metabolic homeostasis. We got a chance to work with Boehringer Ingelheim under the opn2EXPERTS scheme to identify novel peptides that could play a role in metabolic regulation and are excited to share our wonderful experience.
opnMe: How has opnMe´s opn2EXPERTS program helped you to advance your research?
Christian Wolfrum: opn2EXPERTS is a great example of how academic curiosity and industrial expertise in therapeutic research and development can complement one another to synergistically address the societal relevance of scientific research. While academic research on fundamental problems can result in novel discoveries, translating them into therapies can be daunting. The streamlined opn2EXPERTS process and vast experience of the Boehringer scientists, assist basic biology research scientists in navigating through the hurdles of bringing scientific discovery to the start of development and refocus to address the questions that have a broader and significant impact on public health.
opnMe: What do you like in particular about your current collaboration?
Christian Wolfrum: Through regular meetings and open communication, we freely and frequently exchange and refine ideas and redefine objectives as the data accumulates. Besides, we can collaborate on specific mutually agreed aspects to access Boehringer Ingelheim’s state-of-the-art resource/infrastructure pipelines and facilities to generate and validate data more efficiently. Working together with the team at Boehringer Ingelheim has been an extremely fruitful and mutually valuable experience. This has resulted in a dynamic exchange of knowledge, resources, and skills between the two teams.
opnMe: What other feedback would you like to provide to us?
Christian Wolfrum: As we continue our collaboration, we are excited about the recent progress and look forward to the next milestones of our collaborative research. We are confident that our work will yield novel biological insights into systemic metabolic regulation, hopefully leading to new therapeutic concepts. Working with opn2EXPERTS has been a genuinely rewarding experience for us. We encourage other leading labs to participate with Boehringer Ingelheim to find solutions to societal problems by collaborating under the auspices of opn2EXPERTS platform.
opnMe: Many thanks for your feedback, Christian. It has been a pleasure to talk to you.
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About our opn2EXPERTS question:
How would you propose to identify and verify novel peptides that alone or in combination can lead to an unprecedented and/or sustainable weight loss? With ambitious questions like this, we share precisely formulated biological questions with the scientific community as part of our opn2EXPERTS program. By sharing our questions from the biology field, we intend to explore novel solutions for cardiometabolic research that will benefit the needs of patients.
About opnMe:
opnMe.com, the open science portal of Boehringer Ingelheim, fosters science and collaboration initiatives in areas of high unmet medical need. Our molecules are provided to the scientific community either free of charge as “Molecules to Order” or applied for via scientific research submissions as “Molecules for Collaboration”. With our “opn2EXPERTS” and “techMATCH” programs, we enlist scientific advice on key scientific topics to fuel further drug discovery and deliver novel solutions that benefit unmet patient needs. Our "opn2TALENTS" postdoc grants at one of our research sites offer opportunities for high-level talents to propose innovative approaches for precisely defined scientific questions.