Foundations that support efforts to find treatments for rare diseases have stepped in to fill a significant funding gap caused by increasingly conservative venture capitalists and constraints at large pharmaceutical companies. Their considerable financial (in the tens of millions of dollars for many foundations) and intellectual involvement has triggered collaborative translational drug discovery efforts. CHDI Foundation, a virtual biotech exclusively focused on the discovery and development of drugs for Huntington's disease (HD) is one such organization.
Our enterprise is privately funded with a mandate to fast-track possible therapies for HD. Hence, CHDI strives to support all aspects of the drug development process from early exploratory efforts to identify and validate targets, to the screening, medicinal chemistry, preclinical optimization, on through the clinical and regulatory aspects of evaluating candidate molecules in human trials. Without wet-labs and staffed by more than forty individuals who bring a wealth of scientific, medical, business, legal ...
