CAMBRIDGE, U.K., Oct. 15, 2002 (PRIMEZONE) -- Astex Technology, the structure-based drug discovery company, today announced the appointment of Dr. Lyn Leaper as Vice President of Intellectual Property. Dr. Leaper, a qualified European Patent Attorney, will be responsible for the management and further development of Astex's Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and portfolio.
Timothy Haines, Chief Executive of Astex, said, "I am very pleased to welcome Lyn Leaper to Astex. She has a wealth of intellectual property expertise, which will enable Astex to maintain and develop its proprietary position in all aspects of structure based drug design and development."
"Having worked with Astex as a consultant over the past year, I am delighted to be joining the team at this exciting time." commented Dr. Leaper. "The Company has a diverse range of IPR, from computational inventions and protein structures to therapeutic compounds."
Leaper joins Astex from Stratagem Intellectual Property Management, where, as a Principal of the company, she provided strategic IP management and advice to medical and biotechnology companies. Previously, Leaper worked at Akzo Nobel N.V., and from 1999, held the position of Director of Patents at Janssen Pharmaceutica N.V. (a Johnson & Johnson Company). She obtained an honours degree in biochemistry and a Ph.D in plant biochemistry and molecular biology before commencing a career in intellectual property at The Wellcome Foundation Ltd in 1988.
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(R) technologies, which covers all aspects of structurebased 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 validated 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, Aventis Pharmaceuticals and Mitsubishi Pharma focused on solving novel cytochrome P450 crystal structures.
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