Kiadis / Biofrontera Pharmaceuticals sign major joint drug discovery and development collaboration
Wednesday November 27, Leverkusen, Germany and Leiden, the Netherlands - Kiadis BV and Biofrontera Pharmaceuticals GmbH, today announce the signing of a major new collaboration for the discovery and development of new compounds for the treatment of neuropathic pain. The alliance will capitalise on the synergistic key technologies and capabilities of the two companies and will accelerate this exciting programme more rapidly than could be achieved by either party alone. It is intended that product candidates generated by this collaboration will be advanced to the end of pre-clinical development prior to licensing them out for clinical trials. Biofrontera Pharmaceuticals has identified the new disease targets that will form the starting point for the collaboration. Biofrontera was able to identify such targets through use of their novel proprietary method for RNA analysis, Digital Expression Pattern Display, combined with its world-class bioinformatics capabilities. DEPD® is an unsurpassed method for determining the expression profile of nearly every gene in a tissue sample, even in complex tissues. In addition to the identification of the innovative potential targets, Biofrontera will be responsible for the in vitro and in vivo profiling of the compounds that have been identified by Kiadis, as well as the full profiling of the leads that have been optimised.
Kiadis's will apply its proprietary High Resolution Screening (HRS) technology to complex mixtures of molecules derived from either natural product libraries and pooled single compound libraries in order to identify molecules that possess specific bioactivity against selected targets that have been generated by Biofrontera using its proprietary Digital Expression Pattern Display technology (DEPD®). Kiadis will then be responsible for both characterising and profiling the hits that have been generated, as well as their optimisation and scale up.
Gerard Dijkstra, Kiadis CEO, said, "I am delighted to announce our first major collaborative deal with a fellow biotechnology company. I am confident that the combination of the novel targets generated by Biofrontera and our own HRS technology will deliver a truly novel series of compounds for the treatment of neuropathic pain."
Commenting on today's announcement, Professor Hermann Lübbert, President and CEO of Biofrontera said "I am very pleased that we have signed this extremely balanced deal with Kiadis. This collaboration clearly strengthens Biofrontera's technology portfolio to speed up the identification of new therapeutics for our innovative drug targets for neuropathic pain."
Notes to Editors:
Biofrontera Pharmaceuticals (http://www.biofrontera.com/ ) is a drug discovery and development company that focuses on neurological, psychiatric, and inflammatory or neuroinflammatory disorders. Biofrontera's proprietary high-resolution gene expression profiling technology (DEPD®) is complemented with in-house state-of-the-art bioinformatics, and a broad range of preclinical target identification, validation and lead optimisation tools. Biofrontera's technology platform allows the prediction of CNS therapeutic activity and side-effects of drugs. The company also aims at using gene expression for characterising the individual clinical outcome of drug treatment, reducing risk and cost of clinical trials. This outstanding know-how is commercialised through collaborations and on a fee-for-service-basis. Biofrontera has an well balanced project portfolio, with a first project in Phase II clinical trials. Additional research projects are at various stages of preclinical development, lead finding and optimisation, or target identification and validation.
Kiadis BV ( kiadis.com ) is a company that generates high quality, 'patentable' lead molecules from complex mixtures of compounds for optimisation and development. The Company's approach aims to access the enormous chemical diversity to be found in complex mixtures of molecules, e.g. derived from Nature or from expanded (non-purified) combinatorial chemistry. Kiadis' unique and proprietary technology combines compound separation, with the biological evaluation and chemical characterisation of bioactive molecules in parallel, and has been industry validated through collaboration with both Bayer (Xetra: 575200.DE - news) and Monsanto (NYSE: MON - news) . The platform has two configurations: High Resolution Screening (HRS), which can be used to screen non-human-derived complex mixtures for active molecules against drug targets; and Orphan Target Screening (OTS), which can be used to screen human samples (blood, urine, tissue extracts) against orphan targets to identify endogenous ligands. Kiadis was founded in 1997 as a spin-off company from the Leiden/Amsterdam Center of Drug Research (University of Leiden) by Prof. Dr Hubertus Irth, Prof. Dr Jan van der Greef and Dr Ubbo Tjaden. The company raised EUR‚6.5m in its first round of funding from Life Sciences Partners (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Prelude Trust (Cambridge, UK), and Alafi Capital (San Francisco, CA). The company is located at the BioScience Park of the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. |
