EU Backs Consortium Dedicated to Protein Kinase Discovery and Development Services

An EU-funded consortium, the Kinomed Partnership, has been established to provide services for the discovery and development of protein kinase inhibitors to the biotech and pharma industries. Supported by the Eurostars initiative, the Kinomed Partnership combines the expertise of KinaseDetect, Iota Pharmaceuticals, and SARomics Biostructures.

The range of services provided spans all aspects of kinase-based biochemistry and related drug development from kinase production, assay development, and crystal structure determination to fragment library construction, in silico and biochemical screening, hit-finding and optimization, structure- and ligand-based drug design, and medicinal chemistry services.

“Structure-based drug design in combination with fragment-based lead discovery is a powerful combination in modern drug discovery,” comments Olaf-Georg Issinger, Ph.D., KinaseDetect director. “We are collaborating with Iota Pharmacetuicals and SARomics biostructures in developing a service platform to provide the pharmaceutical industry with off-the-shelf three-dimensional structures of kinases and their complexes with novel lead compounds. The provision of such an integrated service platform will greatly accelerate the drug discovery process for this important class of drugs.”

Danish firm KinaseDetect specializes in the provision of recombinant human protein kinases, protein kinase substrates, and protein kinase assay services. U.K.-based Iota Pharmaceuticals is dedicated to providing fragment-based drug discovery services including x-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy. The firm’s capabilities span structure-based drug design, high-content drug screening, and structure-guided lead optimization.

Swedish firm SARomics Biostructures offers comprehensive drug discovery and structural biology outsourcing services from library design and in silico and fragment library screening to hit-to-lead optimization, ASAR analysis, ADME modeling, and protein optimization. In December 2010, SARomics teamed up with Norway-based Vectron Biosolutions to provide a joint service offering covering customized gene-to-structure projects. The firms claim Vectron’s expression vector technology will allow the production of otherwise difficult-to-express proteins for crystaollographic analysis.

The EU’s Eurostars initiative is run jointly by EUREKA and the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7). It claims to be the first European funding and support program specifically dedicated to SMEs.