AOP Health and LBI-NetMed combine expertise in rare diseases, drug development and computational biology.
The partnership aims to generate deeper insights into potential drug candidates and future therapeutic opportunities.
The collaboration supports faster, evidence-based development of urgently needed therapies for people living with rare diseases.
Vienna, 05.11.2026. The Austrian pharmaceutical company AOP Health and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine at the University of Vienna (LBI-NetMed) have launched a strategic scientific partnership to accelerate drug development. By combining AOP Health's expertise in rare diseases and pharmaceutical development with LBI-NetMed's capabilities in computational biology and network medicine, the partners aim to deepen the understanding of disease mechanisms. These insights can help identify promising therapeutic opportunities and support faster, evidence-based development decisions. The collaboration has already started with a joint pilot project and is designed as a long-term academic-industry partnership.
Increasingly, medicine is moving away from viewing diseases as the result of a single faulty gene or protein and towards understanding them as the consequence of complex interactions across entire biological systems. This network-based perspective is helping researchers uncover how disturbances across interconnected pathways drive disease and why understanding these interactions is essential for developing new therapies.
Translating Research into Application
To gain these insights, LBI-NetMed develops and applies advanced computational approaches that can map, visualize and analyze biological networks, with a particular focus on protein interactions.
To date, these approaches have largely been used in basic research settings. The collaboration with AOP Health creates an opportunity to further advance these methods and translate them into drug-development and clinical research activities.
