CAMBRIDGE, U.K., June 10, 2002 (PRIMEZONE) -- Astex Technology, the U.K. structure-based drug discovery company today announced a structural biology research agreement with Mitsubishi Pharma Corporation to facilitate the rapid design and development of drug candidates. The collaboration will focus on solving novel human cytochrome P450 crystal structures that will be used in optimization of Mitsubishi's compounds, and so provide greater potential for their clinical success.
Under the terms of the agreement, Astex will apply its proprietary X-ray crystallography technologies to obtain crystal structures of cytochrome P450s complexed to Mitsubishi's compounds. Financial details were not disclosed.
Timothy Haines, Chief Executive of Astex commented: "We are very pleased that Mitsubishi has chosen to work with Astex in this drug discovery program. The collaboration provides further validation of Astex's structure-based drug discovery technologies, and builds on our recent success in solving the first 3-dimensional crystal structure of a human cytochrome P450 enzyme."
Astex Technology is a structure-based drug discovery company pioneering the use of high throughput X-ray crystallography for the rapid design and development 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 HTXa 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. This includes kinases, phosphatases and proteases implicated in human disease. Astex has research agreements with Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development focused on lead discovery and optimization, and structural biology research agreements with AstraZeneca AB and Aventis Pharmaceuticals exploiting novel cytochrome P450 crystal structures.