Natural compound collaboration

Evotec OAI and Biofrontera Pharmaceuticals have entered into a co-marketing and distribution agreement to offer natural compound libraries for drug discovery.

Natural compounds have significant therapeutic potential and more than 50 per cent of drugs on the market are based on natural compounds as the active principle.

Standard discovery processes are not ideally suited to exploiting natural compounds, the combination of Evotec OAI's screening and medicinal chemistry platform and Biofrontera's complementary discovery skills well suited to optimise such processes to the benefit of customers' drug development programmes.

Biofrontera​ Biofrontera has developed a library of several million natural compounds derived from micro-organisms for use in high throughput screening. Under the terms of the agreement, Evotec will incorporate these compounds into its ultra-HTS services to augment its own diverse screening library of small molecules.

The two companies will also provide pharmacological and chemical services on structures resulting from natural compound screens, including re-fermentation, compound isolation, structure determination, chemical optimisation and pharmacological characterisation in cell cultures, as well as in a range of selected disease models.

Biofrontera's library contains about 140,000 subfractions, containing over 2 million compounds, are immediately available for screening. The company also says it can extend the number of subfractions several-fold.

Biofrontera bought the natural compound library as part of its acquisition​ of bioLeads in July.

The financial terms of the Evotec collaboration have not been disclosed.