Purely Proteins and Inhibox Launch Combined Drug Screening Programs
Cambridge, England. Purely proteins Ltd (Cambridge, UK) and Inhibox Ltd (Oxford, UK) announced the launch of commercial drug discovery services based on their combined proprietary computational and laboratory-based screening technologies.
This platform is commencing with the immediate launch of discovery-ready drug screening programs for families of human phosphatases, kinases and proteases. Key members of these families, such as PTP-1B, c-abl and beta-secretase, are proven therapeutic targets in life-threatening diseases such as diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer's disease. Other therapeutic targets of immediate interest to clients can also be accessed on a fee-for-service basis.
The screening process involves the selection of highly specific virtual drugs against defined therapeutic targets from billions of putative starting compounds, using Inhibox's proprietary computational processes. The resulting highly selected compounds are synthesized and tested in Purely Proteins' comprehensive drug screening platforms. Experimental datasets are then made available for licensing either as new modules within Purely Proteins' existing relational database product TargetBASE, or as patented, early-stage licensing candidates.
TargetBASE already houses detailed structural, biochemical and pharmacological information about therapeutically relevant protein families. This new, experimentally exemplified chemical information will expand its content into the new field of chemical proteomics.
Commenting on the program, Purely Protein's Chief Executive Officer, Dr David Bailey, said, "We are delighted to be working with Inhibox, a company with extensive experience in computer-based drug screening and computational chemistry. The combination of Purely Proteins' expertise in purifying and assaying families of human proteins with the extreme power of Inhibox's computational screening will add significant value to both companies' products very rapidly."
Dr Paul Finn, Chief Executive Officer of Inhibox, said, "Purely Proteins is an ideal partner for Inhibox. Our technologies have been developed to exploit large-scale virtual screening opportunities such as those presented by the human proteome, which we can reduce to practice through Purely Proteins' extensive portfolio of discovery screens. Together, we can rapidly convert in silico designs into validated drug opportunities for new pharma and biotech clients. The collaboration with Purely Proteins is also an attractive mechanism for further progression of the results of the Internet-based Cancer Screensaver Initiative."
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