Pfizer, Universities Research Diabetes

Pfizer has set up a collaboration with Entelos, a Foster City, Calif.-based computer modeling company, and four major research universities: Caltech; MIT; the University of Massachusetts; and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Together they will study insulin signaling in adipose (or fat) cells with the goals of understanding diabetes and obesity and finding new drug targets. In the first phase, researchers at Pfizer, MIT, and UMass will collect and analyze data, which will then be fed to computational groups at MIT, Caltech, and UCSB. Pfizer is funding the initial three-year, $14 million insulin resistance pathway project. If it is successful, a second, two-year program will look at other insulin-sensitive tissues.