Jan. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Aurora Biosciences® Corporation (Nasdaq: ABSC - news) announced today the issuance of U.S. Patent Number 6,143,492 entitled ``Optical Molecular Sensors for Cytochrome P450 Activity.'' Cytochrome P450 is one of several enzymes involved in drug metabolism that can effect the efficacy and safety of potential drug candidates.
``This issued patent further establishes Aurora as a leader in the screening, characterization and prediction of 'drug-like' properties of candidate compounds. The use of early high-throughput drug candidate profiling technologies will aid in the selection of drug leads, guide medicinal chemistry lead optimization and reduce the time and resources needed to develop new medicines,'' said Lewis Makings, Ph.D., Aurora's associate director, chemistry and co-inventor of the cytochrome P450 technology with Gregor Zlokarnik, Ph.D.
``We believe there are strategic opportunities to market and distribute the products covered by this patent with PanVera's purified cytochrome proteins that we will have access to following the completion of our merger with PanVera, and we anticipate these products to be widely adopted by drug discovery and lead optimization groups,'' commented Paul A. Negulescu, Ph.D., Aurora's senior vice president, discovery biology.
Aurora's cytochrome P450 screening technologies (Vivid(TM) technology) provide Aurora and its customers with miniaturized high-throughput in vitro tools for rapidly determining whether candidate drugs have potentially unfavorable interactions with key metabolic enzymes. Currently these unwanted characteristics are identified later in the drug development process, after significant investment has been made in chemistry and pharmacology research... |
