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AnalytiCon Discovery Announces Collaboration Agreement With Merck KGaA on Natural Product Lead Generation Program

31 May 2007 - AnalytiCon Discovery GmbH and Merck KGaA have entered into an agreement whereby AnalytiCon will provide Merck with natural product lead generation services until the end of 2009.
 
Under the agreement, AnalytiCon will apply its proprietary MEGAbolite® technology to exploit a highly diverse set of more than 10,000 extracts from plants and microorganisms. A key step in the process is the identification of organisms with high potential for the delivery of novel natural products by use of AnalytiCon's chemodiversity profiling technology. Initial hits will be explored by combining the strengths of Merck's biology expertise with AnalytiCon's expertise in rapidly dereplicating, isolating and structurally identifying biologically active natural products and optionally delivering series of focused libraries for further testing.
 
Attractive lead compounds will be mutually developed through pre-clinical research, one part of which will be a robust protocol to supply the partners with multi milligram-amounts of the particular biologically active natural products in order to perform hit-to-lead optimization cycles on an as-needed basis.