Drug discovery agreement uses 'novel chemistry'

Heidelberg, Germany-based Graffinity Pharmaceuticals announced today that it has entered into a research collaboration with Amgen, of California, US.

Graffinity will receive fees and success payments for the generation of novel small molecule hits against a broad range of drug targets. Amgen will gain access to Graffinity's proprietary fragment-based drug discovery technology that uses chemical microarrays to screen for small molecule fragments that bind to a variety of drug targets which play a key role in major human diseases. The identification of novel modes of action and chemistry is a major focus of the collaboration.

Mathias Woker, chief business officer of Graffinity, said: 'The novel chemistry that our technology can introduce into a medicinal chemistry program is one of the major reasons why fragments have become a new standard in drug discovery programs of large pharma and biotech companies.

'Graffinity offers one of the largest fragment libraries commercially available today with about 20,000 fragments and 90,000 lead-like structures,' he added.