NEW YORK, Aug. 16 – Bioinformatics company Lion Bioscience of Heidelberg, Germany, said Thursday it had filed for patent protection for a series of lead compounds it had developed.
The announcement marks Lion’s first such application and comes just 16 months after the company launched its drug discovery efforts.
“This exciting result confirms the acceleration that can be achieved by applying integrated IT-solutions in research for drug discovery,” Lion said in a statement.
“The tight integration of information driven biological research, assay development, computational chemistry, with advanced combinatorial chemistry yielded a significant improvement throughout the entire process from gene to lead," the company added.
Lion said that the compounds are designed to work against an undisclosed nuclear receptor and are derived from Lion’s proprietary chemical libraries and in house research. Lion said the compounds could potentially be used as therapeutics for metabolic and endocrine disorders.
The company said it would aim to license its drug candidates to pharmaceutical houses wishing to further develop the compounds.
Lion uses computational chemistry algorithms to select compounds with high probabilities for binding to targets of interest. In December, Lion acquired chemistry company Trega Biosciences.