Cambrex announces new chiral technolgies

Cambrex Corporation, of East Rutherford, NJ, has developed new pathways to chiral molecules used in active pharmaceuticals ingredients (APIs) and advanced intermediates through a business alliance agreement with Dextra Laboratories, based in Reading in the UK.

Dextra specialises in the early development of unique sugar and carbohydrate technologies used to produce chiral pharmaceutical building blocks including the synthesis of carbohydrate building blocks, carbohydrate-based libraries, oligosaccharides, monosaccharides, aza sugars, and locked nucleosides.

Carbohydrates are components of many drugs and drug intermediates and can be derived from the carbohydrate pool. They provide a means to achieve multiple contiguous chiral centres that can be chemically manipulated to form the desired drug intermediate. Using Dextra's technology, Cambrex will generate more complex molecules using its proprietary enzyme technologies coupled with Dextra building blocks to support combinatorial drug discovery with complex, chiral materials of known structure and configuration.

'Our collaboration with Dextra will enhance our in-house capabilities with unique technologies to produce multiple chiral centres and generate more complex molecules with enhanced functionality through the addition of carbohydrate side chains,' said Gary Mossman, president Cambrex Pharma Business Unit, 'We believe the alliance will enhance our portfolio of enabling technologies for novel new drugs from a single source.'

'For some time at Dextra, we have been excited about the potential of carbohydrates as chiral building blocks. We believe that this alliance can pave the way to new classes of drug candidates through the provision of hitherto unavailable chiral structures in quantities suitable for practical development work,' commented Dr Andrew Hacking, joint md, Dextra Laboratories.

Cambrex has also completed a $100m private placement. 'Securing the $100m debt facility was an important step in ensuring that the Cambrex capital structure is optimally positioned to support our short and long term business plans,' said Luke M. Beshar, chief financial officer of Cambrex. The company has also appointed Alexandra Englund as manager, sales and business development for the Cambrex Pharma Business Unit. She will be responsible for developing new business opportunities in Scandinavia and Finland for the Cambrex Pharma facilities located in Europe and will be based at Cambrex Bio Science in Copenhagen, Denmark.