Bio Screening Industry News

Horizon’s X-MAN (Mutant And Normal) cell-line technology provides the first genetically-defined and patient-relevant in vitro models of human cancer. These models are being used by a growing number of Pharma and Biotech companies to rationalize key steps of the ‘targeted’ drug development process, and thus accelerate and economize the burgeoning field of ‘personalised’ medicine.

Horizon Discovery is a translational genomics company founded in June 2007 and is headquartered at the Babraham Research Campus, Cambridge, UK and with additional research laboratories in Torino, Italy. Horizon’s goal is to convert new information on the genetic causes of cancer into laboratory models that will facilitate the discovery of drugs that target these defects. Central to this aim is Horizon Discovery’s offering of X-MAN cell-lines, which represent accurate models of defined cancer patient populations and their matched normal genetic backgrounds – a missing link in the rational and efficient development of novel targeted anti-cancer agents.

Source: Cambridge Network

Kiev, Ukraine, August 23 - 27, 2009

ASMC09 in Kiev is being prepared by EFMC (European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry) and ChemBridge Corporation, in the series of events which started with ASCMC04 Moscow followed by ASMC07 St. Petersburg.

Prof. Erick Carreira, ETH Zurich, Switzerland and Dr Scott Biller, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Cambridge, USA, have kindly accepted to be the Chairmen of the Symposium.

The scientific program of the International Symposium on Advances in Synthetic and Medicinal Chemistry will include:

* 28 invited plenary lectures, presented by highly recognized scientists from academia and the pharmaceutical and biotech industry from Europe, USA and former USSR countries.
* 10 short oral communications which will be selected from submitted abstracts
* poster sessions

The scientific program will be complemented by an attractive cultural program in Kiev.

The topics to be covered during this symposium include:

* New Synthetic Methodologies, Total Synthesis of Natural Products and Heterocyclic Chemistry
* Diversity- and Target-Oriented Synthesis and Chemical Biology
* Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Discovery & Development

The program will also include a commercial exhibition and a half-day Business Mini-Symposium “Small Molecule Screening Libraries in Drug Discovery: Experience and Trends”.

The official language of the symposium is English.

http://www.ldorganisation.com

The upcoming edition of the RICT, the annual symposium of the Société de Chimie Thérapeutique (SCT), will be held in Orléans (France). This prestigious International Conference on Medicinal Chemistry will be organized by the University of Orléans and the Institute of Organic and Analytical Chemistry (ICOA).

Aim of the Symposium
The major change which has occurred in drug discovery during the two last decades has clearly been the tremendous increase in data availability. Years ago, the medicinal chemist relied on very limited information on his compounds provided mainly by pharmacologists. Today, he is in danger of being overwhelmed by the flood of data generated by High Throughput technologies of all kinds, structural and physico-chemical, in vitro and in vivo pharmacology or pharmacokinetics. Even if computer-aided data management is of great assistance during the multiparameter optimization process that will allow going from a hit to a drug candidate, drug design remains an art. More than ever, the training of a medicinal chemist is based on experience and requires multiple confrontations with trial and error. In this regard, while SAR “structure-activity relations” remain specific for a pharmacological target (or family of targets), SPR “structure-properties relations”, such as solubility, permeability, plasma protein binding, metabolism, toxicophores… are generic and can be extrapolated from one series to another. Thus, sharing experiences on SAR and SPR at a precompetitive stage should eventually decrease attrition rates at both clinical and preclinical levels. It is the goal of these 45th RICT in Orleans which, like the 43rd RICT in Lille in 2007, will have as theme “Drug Discovery and Selection”, with a particular spotlight on imaging, to provide a stimulating forum for these exchanges.

More information
To find out more about the topics of the conference, we kindly invite you to visit the symposium website http://www.LDOrganisation.com

Martinsried, Germany, April 29, 2009 / b3c newswire / - Kinaxo Biotechnologies GmbH has successfully applied its Cellular Target Profiling® technology to identify the protein kinase mTOR as a new cellular target of celecoxib (Celebrex®, Pfizer). Celecoxib is a non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory Cox-2 inhibitor approved for the treatment of osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and acute pain. In addition, celecoxib’s anti-proliferative effect has earned it a place in numerous clinical trials against several malignancies.

Link to the news release
http://www.b3cnewswire.com/popup.php?id=149

About KINAXO
Kinaxo Biotechnologies GmbH is a privately-held biotechnology company based in Munich/Martinsried, Germany. We offer advanced chemical proteomics and phosphoproteomics services to support lead compound selection, target deconvolution, drug reprofiling, and off-target toxicity assessment. Kinaxo has several ongoing collaborations, including with Boehringer Ingelheim, Johnson & Johnson and Takeda.

The Salk Institute says it has formed a new stem cell research partnership with Sanofi-Aventis, the international pharmaceutical giant based in Paris. Financial terms of the five-year alliance were not disclosed, and some details of the deal remain to be worked out, Salk spokesman Mauricio Minotta told me this afternoon.

The Sanofi-Aventis regenerative medicine program will sponsor grants in promising research areas, and is intended to provide long-term, multi-participant collaborations between scientists at San Diego-based Salk and Sanofi-Aventis. “It’s meant to be a true collaboration, it’s not just funding,” says Michael White, who oversees the institute’s office of technology management and development. Sanofi-Aventis has about 16,000 employees in the United States, mostly at its U.S. headquarters in Bridgewater, NJ, and about 100,000 employees worldwide.

The program also will provide unrestricted support for the Salk Institute’s stem cell facility, which was created as a separate laboratory supported by private funding during the years the Bush Administration had placed restrictions on federal stem cell funding.

In a statement, Salk president William Brody says there are no preconditions concerning the collaborative alliance. “Our scientists will continue to freely explore cutting-edge research and publish their work,” Brody says. (That’s important to academic freedom, because companies have been known to try to squelch research findings if they don’t support the company’s marketing message.) Under this deal, Salk will also gain access to “extensive resources” at Sanofi-Aventis, which includes a large-scale facility in Tucson, AZ, for screening compounds with potential to be new drugs.

“That’s something that’s very attractive to us, to be able to screen our targets with their drugs,”White says.

Such industry collaborations could be a sign of the times. In January, San Diego’s Burnham Institute for Medical Research announced a multi-year agreement with Johnson & Johnson’s Pharmaceutical Research and Development unit.

Source: xconomy.com

Thermo Fisher Scientific, the world leader in serving science, announced recently that it has introduced a novel tool to accelerate hit-to-lead programmes in the drug discovery process. Its Maybridge Quick2Lead™ Compound Kits are designed to save time and money by enabling rapid compound library synthesis around bioactive “hits” emerging from screening assays. The kits are made up of pre-weighed, diverse building block selections, facilitating rapid capture of structure-activity (SAR) data from the closely related structural analogues within the library.

Quick2Lead Compound Kits are available as five functionality-based kits, with each one containing 48 carefully selected compounds. This enables the exploration of a wide area of chemical space to maximise credible SAR data acquisition for the successful conversion of an initial hit into a genuine, optimisable lead. Since these compounds are all pre-weighed, the kits are ready to use by simply adding solvent and transferring straight to a synthesiser.

The five functional groups available include: carboxylic acids, sulfonyl chlorides, amines, anilines and boronic acids. Each of these different functional groups is applicable to a wide range of tried and trusted parallel synthesis methodologies. Furthermore, although each kit taps into the hugely diverse Maybridge collection, they all include compounds from the top levels of the relevant Topliss Tree, thereby ensuring quality and rigour in interaction testing.

Each of the pre-selected compounds is supplied as 0.1mMol in a 5mL vial. This saves time and money at several levels — minimising stock, avoiding disposal and reducing storage footprint. The pre-selection process also avoids the “dead time” that can be experienced whilst waiting for multiple building blocks from internal and external sources. Maybridge Quick2Lead Kits arrive as a complete library, delivered rapidly ex-stock.

“Our aim with the Maybridge product range is to help shorten the discovery process, from screening to scale-up, and the introduction of our Quick2Lead Compound Kits is the latest addition to our broad product portfolio of pharmacophorically relevant compounds and services,” said Dr. Mick Durrant, Director of Business Development for Maybridge products at Thermo Fisher Scientific. “We recognise that identifying, sourcing and weighing building blocks to feed the library production process around an initial hit can be time consuming and expensive. Our new Quick2Lead Kits offer a novel approach to drive these costs down by providing pre-weighed, diverse building block selections which are simply ready-to-go.”

About Maybridge
Maybridge, part of Thermo Fisher Scientific, is well known for providing highly innovative drug-like molecules and screening compounds for drug discovery and development. With products available for both lab and development scale, they specialise in producing new heterocyclic and phenyl ring-based chemical building blocks, including a unique and expanding range of reactive intermediates.

About Thermo Fisher Scientific
Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is the world leader in serving science, enabling our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. With annual revenues of $10.5B, we have more than 34,000 employees and serve over 350,000 customers within pharmaceutical and biotech companies, hospitals and clinical diagnostic labs, universities, research institutions and government agencies, as well as environmental and industrial process control settings. Serving customers through two premier brands, Thermo Scientific and Fisher Scientific, we help solve analytical challenges from routine testing to complex research and discovery. Thermo Scientific offers customers a complete range of high-end analytical instruments as well as laboratory equipment, software, services, consumables and reagents to enable integrated laboratory workflow solutions. Fisher Scientific provides a complete portfolio of laboratory equipment, chemicals, supplies and services used in healthcare, scientific research, safety and education. Together, we offer the most convenient purchasing options to customers and continuously advance our technologies to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, enhance value for customers and fuel growth for shareholders and employees alike.

SOURCE: Thermo Scientific Brand Products, Part of Thermo Fisher

EVRY, France, March 19 /PRNewswire/ –     Four research teams of I-STEM[*] have joined forces in a collaborative project that has just achieved a first pilot therapy-oriented screen of compounds and RNA interference aiming at reversing the altered phenotypes observed in human embryonic stem cells carrying the mutant gene for myotonic dystrophy type1. This assay inaugurates a series of R&D planned in 2009.Human embryonic stem (hES) cells lines carrying the mutant gene responsible for diseases may replicate associated molecular defects associated and be used, therefore, to analyse pathological mechanisms and search for treatments. I-STEM teams have shown that hES cell lines carrying the mutant gene responsible for myotonic dystrophy type1 (DM1) -the most frequent myopathy in adult- present known cellular and molecular abnormalities. hES capacity of self-renewal and pluripotency provides an unlimited and highly versatile cell resource, relevant for large-scale analyses. In order to exploit fully these potentials of hES cell lines within the framework of its exploration of therapeutics for monogenic diseases, I-STEM has set up a screening department through a close partnership with the companies Velocity11, Discngine and Prestwick Chemical. I-STEM has installed at its site, in Evry-Genopole, a powerful automation platform using the innovative Velocity11 BioCel1800(R) technology, coupled to a specific data management system designed by Discngine. The Conseil Régional d’Ile-de-France and the Association Française contre les Myopathies (thanks to the French Telethon donations) co-funded this platform[**]. The investments to build  this facility assays have been developed in order to screen the “FDA  approved” Prestwick Chemical library and a subset of the in house designed  siRNA (small interferent RNA) library.

Using this screening platform, the I-STEM teams have looked for compounds and siRNA that would provoke the disruption of abnormal aggregation seen in the nucleus of human embryonic stem cells carrying the DM1 mutation. Several of the 1120 compounds and 50 siRNA assayed were identified as candidates.

I–STEM intends to perform five to ten similar screening campaigns per year on other genetic diseases, using its library of human stem cell lines carrying genetic mutations[***].

About I-STEM

The Institute for Stem Cells in the Treatment and Study of Monogenic Diseases- is a laboratory which has set out to explore the therapeutic potential of stem cells in the treatment of rare genetic diseases. Headed by Marc Peschanski (an INSERM Research Director), I-STEM was in early 2005, the first lab in France to be allowed to work on (imported) human embryonic stem cell lines. Then, in June 2006, it was authorized by the French Agency for Biomedicine to set up a library of mutated cell lines that can serve as models in the study of monogenic diseases. For more information: http://www.istem.eu

DORTMUND, Germany and MILAN—The joint research efforts of InterMed Discovery (IMD) and Axxam SpA have resulted in a technology platform that offers screening solutions and the discovery of natural bioactive compounds valuable to companies in the food, beverages, flavor and fragrance industries.

Based on that success, the companies signed a second joint research agreement that will focus on discovery and validation of flavor/fragrance functional ingredients, which will then be offered to food, beverages, flavor and fragrance companies. The proprietary compounds will have clearly defined activity profiles and naturally derived chemical properties.

“This cooperation is a direct response to what we see as growing market needs,” said Dr. Thomas Henkel, managing director of InterMed Discovery. “Our innovative approach to developing natural functional ingredients together with Axxam caters perfectly to the increasing market demand for turnkey solutions.”