Serono extends collaboration with Inpharmatica

Selective drug discovery company Inpharmatica, of the UK, has extended for a further year its two-year collaboration with Swiss biotechnology company Serono.

The new extension follows the expansion of the collaboration announced in January 2003 and provides further funding for a team of scientists at Inpharmatica to develop and apply the company's computational chemogenomics system, PharmaCarta, to the identification of further novel proteins. The two companies entered into the original collaboration in July 2001.

The extension results from the success of the initial collaboration and comes shortly after the announcement in June of Inpharmatica's first milestone payment from Serono for the successful development of a novel secreted protein identified using PharmaCarta, one of over 150 novel putative proteins delivered to Serono to date. Under the terms of the extension agreement, Serono can select an unlimited number of novel proteins from those identified by Inpharmatica, for clinical development and commercialisation.

'Our collaboration with Serono has gone from strength to strength,' said Dr Malcolm Weir, ceo of Inpharmatica. 'The extension validates both the quality of the work of our scientists and our PharmaCarta technology.'