STOCKHOLM, Sweden and MOSCOW, Nov. 24, 2004 (PRIMEZONE) -- ASINEX Ltd, a worldwide leader in lead generation and lead optimization, and Biovitrum AB, a European Biotech company focusing on metabolic diseases R&D, today announced that they have entered into a drug discovery and development collaboration. During the initial three years of the collaboration, drug discovery activities will be focused on finding and optimizing leads suitable for advancing into pre-clinical development for multiple targets proposed by Biovitrum in the field of metabolic diseases.
Under the terms of this agreement, Biovitrum will access ASINEX highly competitive drug discovery capabilities, including novel libraries of drug-like molecules and expertise in lead development and optimization. The collaboration will take advantage of the Biovitrum expertise in metabolic diseases to identify and progress attractive candidate drugs through preclinical and clinical development. The drug discovery collaboration will be performed on a shared risk basis up to the selection of clinical candidates. ASINEX will be eligible for milestones and royalties.
Separately, ASINEX will also provide computational chemistry, screening and medicinal chemistry in order to generate lead series for other undisclosed targets proposed by Biovitrum on a fee-for-service basis.
"ASINEX is well known as a leading provider of high quality compounds for HTS and medicinal chemistry services, and we are seeing that more and more companies are selecting ASINEX as their partner of choice for fully integrated Lead Discovery Services," said Dmitry Genis, ASINEX's CEO. "In this collaboration we will combine our computational, medicinal chemistry and screening experience. This is an excellent validation of our drug discovery platform."
Mats Pettersson, CEO of Biovitrum stated, "The shared risk drug discovery collaboration with ASINEX allows Biovitrum to cost-effectively expand its drug discovery project portfolio and increase the delivery of drugs for clinical development."
For additional information, please contact:
Biovitrum
Thomas Olin, Senior Director, Business Development Phone: +46-8-697 31 69 Mobile: +46-70-246 72 21 thomas.olin@biovitrum.com
ASINEX Ltd Alistair Melvin, Head of Business Development Phone: +7 095 728 3891 busdev@asinex.com
Biovitrum is a privately held Swedish biotechnology company with its operations focused on the discovery and development of innovative drugs, primarily for the treatment of metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and obesity. The company has a number of potential new drugs in development internally and in strategic alliances with partners. Biovitrum also offers contract services and collaborations in process development and manufacturing of protein therapeutics, and markets a portfolio of products in the Nordic territory. For more information, please visit www.biovitrum.com.
ASINEX (www.asinex.com/) is a provider of 'Intelligent Chemistry' for lead generation and optimization. ASINEX is an innovative creator of novel high quality compound libraries for screening, and has more than 400,000 drug-like small molecules. With a total of 151 chemists (54 Ph.D.), 9 computational chemists (7 Ph.D.) and 32 biologists / biochemists (20 Ph.D.), ASINEX is establishing itself as a company of choice for integrated drug discovery services.
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