Astex and Fujisawa announce structure-based drug discovery agreement

25-Aug-2003

Cambridge, UK and Osaka, Japan. Astex Technology Ltd, the fragment-based drug discovery company, and Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd, announced a structural biology research agreement to facilitate the rapid design and development of drug candidates. The collaboration will focus on solving novel human cytochrome P450 crystal structures that will be used to optimise Fujisawa's compounds and so improve the success rate of drug development.

Under the terms of the agreement, Astex will apply its proprietary X-ray crystallography technologies to obtain crystal structures of cytochrome P450s complexed to Fujisawa's compounds. Financial details were not disclosed.

"We are very pleased that Fujisawa has chosen to work with Astex in this exciting drug discovery program," commented Timothy Haines, Chief Executive of Astex. "This collaboration provides further validation of our structure-based drug discovery technologies and our leadership role in the P450 field. We look forward to building on our recent successes in solving the first 3-dimensional crystal structures of human cytochrome P450s 3A4 and 2C9 and to using this knowledge to benefit Fujisawa's drug discovery programs."

"We expect that this collaboration with Astex will lead to enhanced potential for research and development activities at Fujisawa," commented Toshio Goto, Ph.D., Corporate Vice President, Global Research of Fujisawa. "Many candidate drugs fail due to adverse cytochrome P450 interactions. We will use the structural information of Fujisawa's compounds in complexation with human cytochrome P450s obtained by Astex in order to design new drug entities with reduced cytochrome P450 liabilities and further improve the quality of our drug development."

https://www.bionity.com/en/news/27932/astex-and-fujisawa-announce-structure-based-drug-discovery-agreement.html