SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--Terrapin Technologies here formed its first alliance with a company that uses bioinformatics when it entered into a collaboration with UK-based Pharmagene late last month to discover therapeutic agents to treat migraine headaches and disorders related to gastrointestinal motility, according to Rey Gomez, Terrapin's vice-president of research and development.
"Our collaboration with Pharmagene is the first of what we expect will be multiple collaborations in the genomics field," stated Clifford Orent, Terrapin's chairman and CEO. Terrapin plans to use TRAP, its proprietary chemoinformatics technology, and its diverse small-molecule compound library to identify compounds that exhibit a high affinity for Pharmagene's targets. When promising compounds are identified, the companies intend to expand the collaboration into a joint research and development program to deliver clinical candidates.
Pharmagene is a drug discovery company whose proprietary databases link discoveries in gene and protein expression and pharmacology with human pathology. Terrapin, launched in 1987, is a privately held pharmaceutical discovery company.