BioScreening - organic compounds for screening

30.10.2004 October 2004 Bioscreening News Archive
Roche and Pharmasset announced a partnership to develop nucleoside polymerase inhibitors for the treatment of chronic  hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections. Pharmasset will receive an upfront fee, research and development support, and milestone payments that could total $168 million for PSI-6130, the lead nucleoside compound of the partnership. PSI-6130 may have the potential to offer greater efficacy and activity against HCV, especially in combination with Roche's Pegasys (peginterferon alfa-2a) and Copegus. Ro-PR 10/28/04

Pharmacopeia Drug Discovery has expanded and extended its collaboration with Neurocrine Biosciences. The initial phase of Pharmacopeia's lead discovery collaboration with Neurocrine recently resulted in the successful delivery of lead compounds to Neurocrine, and, based on Neurocrine's decision to advance the compounds from lead discovery towards clinical development candidates, Pharmacopeia earned an undisclosed milestone payment. POP-PR 10/25/04

ComGenex and Echelon Biosciences announced the extension and expansion of their drug discovery and development collaboration. Both companies have benefited from this productive two-year relationship. ComGenex has provided Echelon with proprietary small molecules and drug discovery chemistry expertise while Echelon has contributed its rich biology knowledge of lipid cell signaling of promising cancer targets.ComG-PR 10/25/04

Arena Pharmaceuticals announced  that Merck & Co. has extended and increased the funding of research under their existing cadiovascular collaboration until October 2007, and expanded the scope of the collaboration to include a wider range of potential therapies for important cardiovascular diseases. Under the amended collaboration, Merck will fund $5.7 million a year for collaboration research at Arena. Arena-PR 10/20/04

Norak Biosciences has enterd into a research agreement with Curis to investigate the use of its Transfluor(R) technology with a novel class of receptors of interest to Curis. Under terms of the agreement, Norak will utilize its proprietary Transfluor Technology, related intellectual property and scientific expertise to developed Transfluor cell lines expressing Curis' receptors. To date, Norak has partnered Transfluor(R) with 10 pharmaceutical, biotechnology or major research institutions. Nor-PR 10/20/04

Norak Biosciences has announced the signing of a screening services agreement with Purdue Pharma to utilize Transfluor® technology for G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) based drug discovery. Under the terms of the agreement Norak will develop Transfluor® cell lines expressing an orphan GPCR target of interest to Purdue and then screen this cell line in its high throughput screening facility against a Purdue compound library. Nor-PR 10/14/04

Biolog has received a Phase II SBIR grant for $2.5 million from the NIH to extend its Phenotype MicroArray™ (PM) assay platform in toxicological cell-based assays. The company has already developed a battery of cell assays in its PM technology for use with human and mouse cell lines under the Phase I portion of this grant. The goal of the Phase II grant is to further develop the cell based assay as an in vitro replacement to animal models in some applications of toxicology testing. Bio-PR 10/13/04

Norak Biosciences has signed a second license agreement granting Merck the right to use Norak's Transfluor® technology for G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) drug discovery. Under the terms of the agreement, Merck will internalize Transfluor for use broadly with GPCR targets of interest. This second agreement follows an agreement signed in 2002 granting Merck limited access to Transfluor, with Norak providing cell line development. Nor-PR 10/6/04

ObeTherapy Biotechnology and Accelrys (a subsidiary of Pharmacopeia) announce a collaborative agreement under which Accelrys will apply its software to identify potential drugs to counter obesity. Accelrys will provide ObeTherapy with three-dimensional structural information relating to a specific target identified by ObeTherapy as relevant to obesity treatment. Based on this information, Accelrys will then use its rational drug design tools to identify candidate lead compounds for further testing and optimization. Acc-PR 10/5/04 More bioscreening news...