Evotec OAI and Biofrontera to offer natural compounds for drug discovery services
Biotech company Evotec OAI and Biofrontera Pharmaceuticals Holding have signed a comarketing and distribution agreement to offer natural compounds for drug discovery services.
Biotech company Evotec OAI and Biofrontera Pharmaceuticals Holding have signed a comarketing and distribution agreement to offer natural compounds for drug discovery services.
For high-throughput screening Biofrontera utilises a unique collection of micro-organisms and several million natural compounds derived from them. Evotec OAI will incorporate these compounds into its ultra-high-throughput screening services augmenting its diverse screening library of small molecules. Pharmacological and chemical services on structures resulting from natural compound screens will be provided by both companies to customers to progress promising leads into the clinic.
Biofrontera's huge largely unexploited pool of natural compounds constitutes a rich source of potential drug candidates. About 140,000 subfractions, containing more than 2m compounds, are immediately available for screening and the number of subfractions can be extended several-fold.
Natural compounds have significant therapeutic potential and more than 50% of drugs on the market today are based on natural compounds as the active principle. Whereas standard discovery processes are not ideally suited to exploiting natural compounds, the companies believe that the combination of Evotec OAI's screening and medicinal chemistry platform and Biofrontera's complementary discovery skills is well suited to optimise such processes to the benefit of customers' drug development programmes.
Following the isolation of active compounds after screening, the two companies will offer customers all the services needed to progress optimised leads into clinical development. These include refermentation, compound isolation, structure determination, chemical optimisation, and pharmacological characterisation in cell cultures as well as in a range of selected disease models.
During the collaboration, Biofrontera will not enter into similar agreements with other providers of screening services, but is free to collaborate on its own with customers and partners in drug discovery and development.