Partners will exploit Emanine’s integrated drug discovery technologies and libraries.

Ukrainian firm Enamine established a collaboration with the U.K.’s Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC LMB), and the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (IOCB), aimed at discovering rhomboid protease inhibitor drug candidates against infectious, parasitic, oncological, immune, and cardiovascular diseases.

Enamine is a specialist provider of screening compounds, chemical building blocks, and drug discovery services. Under terms of its agreement with MRC LMB and IOCB, the firm will provide access to its integrated drug discovery platform, including compound libraries and screening assays, molecular modeling platform, hit finding and characterization expertise, hit-to-lead chemistry technology, and ADMET capabilities. Any IP resulting from the program will be owned jointly by the three organizations. The aim is to partner out small molecule inhibitors identified through the project for clinical development.

“This alliance reflects our strategy to apply our integrated discovery platform, cost-effective solutions, and state-of-the-art technologies to create valuable IP for our partners and clients,” states Sergey Zozulya, Ph.D., vp for biology at Enamine. “With our recently introduced high-throughput screening and bioanalytical service components, we have added capability to boost productivity.”

Enamine opened its contract biology laboratory at its main research site in Kyiv back in January. The new lab offers ADMET and biomolecular screening services to complement the firm’s existing drug discovery capabilities. Also in January Enamine reported extending its existing relationship with drug discovery services firm BioFocus. The latter acquired from Enamine a large new compound screening library, which it planned to make available to its HTS collaborators during early 2012.

In April Enamine and UkrOrgSynthesys announced a collaboration through which they will be able to offer clients chemical building blocks from each other’s catalogs. The firms say the agreement means that in combination they represent the largest manufacturer and seller of chemical building blocks, with 60,000 products available from stock and about another 8 million deliverable within 4–6 weeks.

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