The Cognis Group ranks among the world leaders in specialty chemicals. Cognis is renowned for its top quality environmentally friendly products manufactured from natural raw materials and for its dedication to science, education, technical expertise and innovative marketing solutions. Cognis Nutrition & Health offers an innovative product portfolio with a wide range in the area of functional food, food supplements and for the pharmaceutical industry.

Cognis and InterMed Discovery (IMD), an emerging world class natural product lead-discovery company, recently announced that Cognis has exclusively licensed an anti-obesity product candidate from InterMed Discovery’s advanced discovery pipeline of functional food ingredients. This transaction is the first to follow the cooperation agreement signed by the two companies in March this year. Scientists at IMD, using IMD’s advanced discovery platform, discovered the unique natural product and qualified its promising weight reducing properties through preclinical in vivo studies in several obesity models. As this ingredient has already shown initial safety and efficacy in animal studies, Cognis will now be able to set up first human studies very rapidly. This will allow to shorten the time-to-market significantly.  

Under the terms of a licensing agreement, Cognis is now taking over the lead to develop the product candidate and will be responsible for marketing any products resulting from this process. In return, InterMed Discovery will receive an upfront payment and royalties for this innovative molecule.