Astex Announces Plans for New, Purpose-Built Facility on Cambridge Science Park


CAMBRIDGE, U.K., Jan. 23, 2002 (PRIMEZONE) -- Astex Technology, the structure-based drug discovery company pioneering the use of high throughput X-ray crystallography technology, today announced the construction of a 36,000 sq.ft. purpose-built facility on the Cambridge Science Park. This new building will support the further expansion of the company and enable the continued development of its leading edge technologies for identification of novel small-molecule therapeutics.

Astex's significant growth over the last year has been driven by the success of its unique structural screening approach in generating potent lead compounds for progression into medicinal chemistry. This success has required the establishment of a substantial and experienced medicinal chemistry team, which will continue to grow over the next few years as the number of programs increase and the compounds progress through lead optimization and into development.

Plans for Astex's new property include purpose-built laboratories, offices, and computational facilities. The initial 36,000 sq.ft. will house up to 150 research scientists, and can be extended to cover an additional 30,000 sq.ft.

Timothy J. Haines, Chief Executive of Astex said, "This new facility will put us in a strong position to continue rapid progression of the novel lead discovery approaches being developed at Astex. Construction has already begun at the site and we expect to move early in 2003."

Astex Technology is a structure-based drug discovery company pioneering the use of high throughput X-ray crystallography for the rapid identification of novel drug candidates. The company's unique structural screening approach utilizes protein crystal structures to detect the binding of drug fragments, which are then optimized into potent lead compounds. Facilitating this approach is the company's integrated drug discovery platform of HTX(TM) technologies, which covers all aspects of structure-based research, including protein production, crystallization, structure determination, bioinformatics and computational and medicinal chemistry. Astex is focusing its drug discovery approaches on proprietary and public domain protein targets from families and/or pathways, including validated kinases, phosphatases and proteases implicated in human disease. Astex has research agreements with

Janssen Research Foundation, a division of Johnson & Johnson, and a structural biology research agreement with AstraZeneca AB focused on solving novel cytochrome P450 crystal structures.

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