NEW YORK, Dec. 17 — Structural Bioinformatics said on Monday it has formed a research partnership with a Boehringer Ingelheim affiliate in Canada to discover new drug targets against HIV.
According to San Diego-based SBI, the collaboration will allow researchers at Boehringer Ingelheim in Canada to use its database of 3-D protein structures as part of in silico drug-discovery efforts.
SBI's database, called Variome, is a structural pharmacogenomic database with more than 100,000 variant 3-D protein structures for HIV protease and reverse transcriptase. It links nucleotide sequences and structural data with demographic and clinical annotations.
The partnership will allow Boehringer Ingelheim scientists to predict drug activity and prioritize potential compounds, SBI chairman and CEO Edward T. Maggio said in a statement. Researchers will use the database to incorporate information about viral mutations into drug design.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Boehringer Ingelheim (Canada) is based in Burlington, Ontario. Its Laval, Quebec pharmaceutical research center, where researchers will use the SBI database, has a focus in virology.