AbbVie Inc. reported four new collaborations and investments with healthcare companies to advance early-stage research in key therapeutic areas such as oncology and immunology. The company is committed to investing in and developing transformational science and technologies to advance the next-generation of therapies across its robust pipeline in key therapeutic areas. With more than 50 compounds in clinical development, AbbVie's pipeline spans significant areas of medical need including oncology, immunology, neuroscience and virology. The collaboration between AbbVie and Pure MHC will seek to identify a library of peptide targets for further research across multiple tumor types and advance AbbVie's ongoing development of next-generation immuno-oncology therapies. AbbVie has entered into an exclusive license with Dong-A-ST, for MerTK inhibitors in pre-clinical development for use in conjunction with immuno-oncology therapies. The addition of this mechanism will advance AbbVie's existing research into immuno-oncology therapies and complement its oncology pipeline under development for nearly 20 cancers and tumor types. AbbVie and Zebra Biologics Inc., have entered into a partnership to discover agonist antibody therapeutics for inflammatory diseases. Zebra will utilize its novel and patented function-based antibody discovery platform to generate antibodies that activate biological pathways associated with targets designated by AbbVie. Zebra and AbbVie will collaborate closely on the identification and pre-clinical validation of emerging candidates. AbbVie and Genomics Medicine Ireland (GMI), a life sciences startup company, have partnered to conduct population genomics research in Ireland. The alliance will sequence the genomes of 45,000 volunteers across Ireland.