NEW YORK, Aug 14 – Exelixis of South San Francisco, Calif., has announced an agreement with Elan Pharmaceuticals to develop a compound library, marking Exelixis’ initial chemistry deal.

“This is our first chemistry-focused collaboration and it validates the quality of the discovery organization, while offsetting some of the cost of building our large high throughput screening compound library for drug discovery at Exelixis,” George Scangos, Exelixis’s CEO, said in a statement released Monday.