SAN DIEGO, Calif.--Structural Bioinformatics here has signed an agreement with an unnamed Japanese pharmaceutical company to use its Dynapharm technology to design novel compounds. The Japanese partner has requested anonymity, according to Structural Bioinformatics officials.
"SBI has extended its reach into Asia Pacific with this collaboration," noted Edward Maggio, the company's president and CEO. "The strategic fit with our new partner is particularly good, and the project is an important application of our ability to do virtual chemical screening with SBI's dynamically modeled templates of protein active sites." Specifically, the deal involves SBI using bioinformatics to screen and identify low molecular weight compounds that interact with a certain target receptor protein. The Japanese company will test the activities of identified compounds, then both companies will screen and synthesize compounds with greater activity, in hopes of quickly discovering a promising drug lead.
The deal is Structural Bioinfor matics' second corporate alliance; it is also collaborating with the Canadian company BioChem Pharma, as well as doing its own lead discovery and development. Structural Bioinformatics has developed a supercomputational operating system that makes possible the immediate, practical use of genomic data in a variety of structure-based drug discovery and design processes, and is pursuing collaborations with pharmaceutical, gene discovery, and combinatorial chemistry companies.