Firms claim libraries will enhance integrated drug discovery engine.

BioFocus and InterMed Discovery (IMD) inked a marketing collaboration that will allow BioFocus to offer IMD’s natural product screening libraries through its drug discovery services. IMD will in addition provide follow-on services to BioFocus.

“We have been impressed with the scale of IMD’s natural product discovery capabilities, and we believe that when InterMed’s natural product libraries and services are combined with our screening services, our engine for drug discovery will be substantially enhanced and more cost-effective for our clients,” comments Chris Newton, Ph.D., BioFocus MD.

IMD was established as a management buyout from Bayer HealthCare in Germany. The firm’s expertise is based on its natural compound libraries and related databases, which are being exploited to offer compound discovery and consultancy to the pharmaceutical, crop science, and food industries. IMD claims to offer the largest collections of pure compounds, sample fractions, and mixtures as its source for potential natural product leads.  

The firm is in addition generating a pipeline of early-stage pharmaceuticals and functional ingredients based on compounds it says have shown interesting in vitro or in vivo potential. Biologically characterized product leads are identified using the IMD Bioprofiling and Npsilico technologies, which together comprise a bioinformatics platform that draws on years worth of screening results, complemented by primary biological and chemical research on natural products.

The Npsilico platform is composed of literature and proprietary information about bioactive natural products. IMD claims that this enables the identification of lead structures without de novo wet lab identification, through systematic, focused, and structure-driven research.

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