Evotec and Taisho start drug delivery collaboration

Hamburg-based, Evotec OAI has entered into a drug discovery collaboration with Taisho Pharmaceutical, of Tokyo, Japan.

Evotec will perform biology r&d on selected Taisho targets (including target expression and reagent production) and develop assays for those targets using Evotec's proprietary VLiP technology. Upon successful development of the assays, Evotec will screen the targets against compounds from the Evotec corporate chemical library using EVOscreen, its ultra-high-throughput screening platform, and will characterise hits identified in the screening.

Joern Aldag, president and ceo of Evotec said: 'We are delighted about Taisho's decision to select Evotec as its drug discovery partner. For us this agreement represents the first integrated collaboration with a Japanese pharmaceutical company. We are confident that we can make a significant contribution to Taisho's drug discovery programmes.'

Kunihiro Kitamura, eo of Taisho Pharmaceutical, said: 'We consider Evotec's technologies to be superior technologies and we expect that this discovery collaboration will bring a contribution to our research and development activity for the discovery research.'

Evotec has also extended its original one year discovery chemistry agreement with Roche for an additional two years.

Under the agreement Evotec will supply chemical compound libraries and related data to Roche on a range of chemical structures, which will be added to Roche's worldwide compound library collection and used in its drug discovery screening programmes.