CAMBRIDGE, U.K., March 25, 2002 (PRIMEZONE) -- Astex Technology, the private, structure-based drug discovery company, today announced a structural biology research agreement with Aventis Pharmaceuticals to facilitate the rapid design and development of drug candidates. The collaboration, Astex's second of this type, will focus on solving novel human cytochrome P450 crystal structures that will be used in the optimization of Aventis' compounds and so provide greater potential for their clinical success.
Under the terms of the agreement, Astex will apply its proprietary X-ray crystallography technologies to obtain crystal structures of cytochrome P450s complexed to Aventis' compounds. Financial details were not disclosed.
Timothy Haines, Chief Executive of Astex stated, " We are delighted to be collaborating with Aventis and to be able to build upon our successes in this field with one of the world's top pharmaceutical companies. The first 3-dimensional crystal structure of a human cytochrome P450 enzyme, that we announced recently, is an important discovery, and will be used as part of this collaboration to enable rational design of drugs with reduced metabolic and toxicity problems."
Astex Technology is a structure-based drug discovery company pioneering the use of high throughput X-ray crystallography for the rapid identification of novel drug candidates. The company's unique structural screening approach utilizes protein crystal structures to detect the binding of drug fragments, which are then optimized into potent lead compounds. Facilitating this approach is the company's integrated drug discovery platform of HTX(R) technologies, which covers all aspects of structure-based research, including protein production, crystallization, structure determination, bioinformatics and computational and medicinal chemistry. Astex is focusing its drug discovery approaches on proprietary and public domain protein targets from families and/or pathways. This includes validated kinases, phosphatases and proteases implicated in human disease. Astex has research agreements with Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development focused on lead discovery and optimization, and a structural biology research agreement with AstraZeneca AB focused on solving novel cytochrome P450 crystal structures.