NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Scottish firm Sistemic today announced a master service agreement to use its SistemRNA suite of drug development tools to accelerate Redx Pharma's preclinical development pipeline of more than 250 new drug candidates.
The agreement follows a project between the two companies in which Sistemic "added significant value" to a lead program of Redx while saving significant costs, Sistemic said.
Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
The SistemRNA approach is a microRNA-based screening platform, which identifies drug effects by associative changes in miRNA expression profiles. Those changes are analyzed against Sistemic's proprietary database of known drug responses called SistemKB.
The compounds are then fully characterized based on indication, mechanisms of action, off-target effects, and toxicology profile.
In a statement, Verna McErlane, director of commercial operations for Sistemic, said, "[O]ur approach is gaining wider acceptance from the drug development community, in addition to the cell therapy markets, and we expect this to lead to a number of high value master service agreements throughout 2011."
Based in Glasgow, UK, Sistemic develops miRNA-based services and kit-based products for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and cell therapy markets.