The accord – financial terms of which were not disclosed – will focus on the provision of laboratory-based and computational drug discovery services.
Domainex will provide is protein expression, biochemical assay, computational and medicinal chemistry capabilities to the partnership.
Fellow Cambridge, UK based Cresset will focus on the provision of computational hit identification and drug design services.
Domainex CEO Eddy Littler said the enlarged offering provided by the partnership would be of benefit to pharmaceutical industry customers, particularly those with discovery projects requiring chemistry and biology expertise.
He said: “Together we can offer customers an unrivalled capability to identify novel hit compounds against important drug targets, and to progress these all the way to candidate drugs.
Littler said Cresset’s “field point technology and associated ligand-based approaches to targets such as GPCRs and ion-channels” dovetail with his firm’s enzyme and protein expertise.
Cresset CEO Rob Scoffin was similarly enthusiastic about the partnership. He suggested that together the firms “offer unrivalled capabilities in drug discovery and development.
“We are able to provide integrated services which will include access to Cresset’s existing applications as well as our pipeline of cutting edge computational science and yet-to-be-commercialised methods.”
Domainex relocation
Formation of the partnership follows shortly after Domainex announced it would relocate its laboratory to a larger facility at Chesterford Research Park in Saffron Walden in Essex.
Domainex has been at the Cambridge laboratory since 2011 when it last relocated in response to growing customer demand for its discovery services.
Cresset moved to its current headquarters in Litlington, Cambridge in 2013. At the time Scoffin told us the firm was seeing increased demand for library design services, both from sponsors that have shed in-house capacity and CROs that lack the specialist expertise to carry out such work.
He said: “With many drug discovery companies having restructured their R&D groups the ability for them to outsource library design, ligand based virtual screening and patent analysis is a vital element in their R&D pipelines, but accessed as a cost effective external resource.”