Alliance for Performance Enhanced Medicines

A collaborative agreement has been announced for the joint discovery of performance enhanced medicines (PEMs), novel pharmaceutical products created by using advances in biology to identify applications of established drugs in new indications. The companies involved are GeneFormatics, Inc. (San Diego, CA, USA) and Arakis, Ltd. (Essex, UK).

GeneFormatics is a drug discovery company employing proprietary structural and chemoproteomic technologies for the discovery of target-specific drugs, while Arakis is an emerging specialty-pharmaceutical company focusing on the development and commercialization of innovative, market-orientated therapeutic products.

Under the terms of the agreement, GeneFormatics will use its structural proteomics capabilities to identify and describe secondary biochemical functional sites. This information, combined with Arakis' proprietary know-how and databases, will be used to define and validate protein targets for joint development of PEMs as pharmaceutical products.

"We are pleased to enter into this collaboration with Arakis, which marks our first drug discovery agreement,” said Dr. John Chiplin, president and CEO of GeneFormatics. "Our proprietary structural and chemoproteomics technologies will be used to screen and validate annotations against Arakis' database of pharmacological targets for the development of performance enhanced medicines in select therapeutic areas.”

"Through a combination of biology, chemistry, and in silico technologies, we intend to identify and create enhanced therapies tailored to treat diseases more effectively,” said Dr. Ken Cunningham, CEO of Arakis.



Related Links:
GeneFormatics
Arakis