BIRMINGHAM, Ala. & NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–DiscoveryBioMed, Inc. (DBM) and Mount Sinai School of Medicine (MSSM) have agreed to move forward on multiple “fee for service” contracts in human cell optimization, assay optimization and pilot drug discovery bioassays on behalf of the Mount Sinai Office of Technology and Business Development (OTBD) and MSSM investigators.

“DiscoveryBioMed is very pleased that MSSM has chosen our company and its novel approaches to the drug discovery process to begin work on these initial projects,” said DBM’s CEO Dr. Erik Schwiebert. “We seek to provide access to drug discovery infrastructure at a reasonable cost to academic clients. We also see our academic clients as partners in the process.”

Experiments have already commenced on assay optimization and pilot drug screening will begin shortly. DiscoveryBioMed has developed several commercial-academic partnerships over its first 15 months of formal operation. DBM’s particular expertise is the development and/or engineering of human cell cultures and lines from normal or diseased tissue that serve as relevant platforms on which to accelerate this drug discovery process. It is the early formative steps of a drug discovery program that are critical, even before the first small molecule is screened.

“As part of this joint effort, DBM is using a particular human cell model that is especially relevant to one of these projects and is building assays around other relevant human cell lines that will serve as the drug discovery platforms,” explained Dr. Eric Seales, DBM’s Chief Laboratory Officer. CEO Dr. Erik Schwiebert explains DBM’s novel core principle in a simple way: “One is going to eventually treat a human with the best discovered lead compounds going forward so why not screen on a human cell background.”

”We are pleased to have a partner in DBM who provides us with drug discovery services consistent with our academic needs and capabilities,” said Patrick McGrath, Executive Director of MSSM’s OTBD. “We have been expanding our resources and capabilities in the area of technology development in order to further typical academic early stage technologies to a point that they are more attractive to partners who can translate the technology into products and service that can benefit the public. We anticipate that our partnership with DBM will help us meet this goal by identifying lead compounds against new disease relevant pathways some of which will hopefully lead to new therapeutics. In the absence of these technology development resources academic technologies often are not further developed in a commercial direction and as a result potentially useful products and services go unexplored.”