HEIDELBERG, Germany, April 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Graffinity Pharmaceuticals AG, a leader in the emerging field of Chemical Genomics, today announced that it has entered into a research collaboration with Serono S.A., Europe's leading biotechnology company, to discover novel therapeutics for the treatment of major diseases in a variety of fields including immunology and reproductive health.
Under the terms of the Agreement, Serono will provide to Graffinity five target proteins. Graffinity will apply its proprietary RAISE® (Rapid Affinity Instructed Structure Evolution) Technology and drug-fragment chemical microarrays to identify and evolve small molecule lead structures focusing on compounds with novel modes of action.
"Fragment-based drug discovery is an exciting new approach to finding therapeutic leads with novel mode of actions," said Dr. Tim Wells, Serono's Senior Executive Vice President of Research. "We have been impressed with the Graffinity research team and look forward to collaborating with them on a number of high priority targets."
Under terms of the agreement, which reinforces Serono's commitment to the expansion of their pipeline to include products generated from small molecules, Serono will have the option to have full ownership for any lead structures generated by Graffinity. Graffinity will retain the right to develop compounds for which Serono does not exercise its option.
Dr. Klaus Schollmeier, Chief Executive Officer of Graffinity, stated, "Our ability to work with a company of Serono's stature and reputation fulfills an important milestone for our company in 2003 and we are honored to have been chosen to work with them on these projects. Our RAISE® drug discovery platform and process is uniquely suited to this endeavor, since our drug fragment libraries, together with the proprietary label - and assay-free high-throughput imaging technology, allows us to evolve lead structures for both known as well as novel mode of actions -- exploiting a chemical space different from other established discovery strategies."
Graffinity will receive fees over a period of time based on the achievement of specific preclinical and clinical milestones. In addition, Graffinity has the potential to receive royalties on any products Serono commercializes as a result of this collaboration.
Dr. Schollmeier concluded, "We are confident that the results of this research collaboration will prove instrumental to the innovative efforts of the Serono team as they pursue their in-house drug development goals."
Graffinity Pharmaceuticals is a drug discovery and pre-clinical development company and leader in the emerging field of Chemical Genomics. With its chemical microarray drug discovery platform now fully operational, the establishment of corporate partnering programs, and the initiation of internal development efforts, Graffinity has entered the next stage of corporate development. Utilizing its technology base, Graffinity will continue to pursue a small number of high-profile collaborations, while building its own pipeline of pre-clinical product candidates.
Graffinity's proprietary chemical genomics platform combines new chemistry approaches, physics, information technology and microsystem technologies to screen potential drug targets for its own pipeline as well as for leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical partners, worldwide. Critically important is the combination of chemical microarrays of drug fragment libraries with a proprietary method for the standardized, label-free detection of compound- protein interactions. No assay development is necessary. Through Graffinity's RAISE® (Rapid Affinity Informed Structure Evolution) approach, small organic molecules identified in the first round are quickly progressed into highly specific lead-like structures. The result is rapid, scalable drug discovery, which explores a rich chemical universe to find the compounds that will be needed to develop drugs against the wealth of targets already available or those uncovered by genomics. The resulting lead structures are licensed to its partners or further developed by its rapidly expanding medicinal chemistry department.
Graffinity has recently established collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotechnological partners including Pfizer and Eli Lilly. The Company, based in Heidelberg, Germany, was founded in 1998 and currently employs approximately 90 people.
For more information, please visit www.graffinity.com |
