Under the terms of the agreement, Novartis Discovery Technologies will use Inpharmatica's Chematica technology to identify molecular targets, for Novartis' bioactive compound project. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.
The agreement aims to enhance drug discovery efficiency by promoting a more effective design of novel drugs against known targets. In addition, by focussing drug discovery efforts on those disease associated proteins the chances of producing effective drugs increases.
Chematica is the chemogenomics component of PharmaCarta, Inpharmatica's gene to candidate platform, bridging the gap between biology and chemistry. Chematica is capable of target selection through druggability assessment and rapid identification of hits and leads against those targets.
The technology involves an integrated bio and cheminformatics platform incorporating proprietary protein structure modelling applications and specialized databases (StARLITe).
Commenting on the announcement, a spokesman for Inpharmatica told DrugResearcher.com: "The collaboration's main objective is to identify targets shown by Novartis to have potentially therapeutic activities in assay systems, such as biological disease model systems."
"The targets are human protein targets. Once identified it should be possible to configure simpler assays to enable more effective chemical analogue screening."