Evotec was selected by Tokyo, Japan-based Asahi Kasei to carry out a multi-target screening project on several ion channel targets in March 2015, but the collaboration is now being expanded into a fully integrated drug discovery project.
“The work at Evotec under this new agreement will be initiated with the hit compounds identified and selected HTS campaign executed at Evotec before,” Gabriele Hanson, spokesperson from the contract research organisation (CRO), told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.
“We will invest our staff resource and infrastructures to this collaboration.”
The CRO has been pursuing a series of strategic partnerships with its customers over the past few years, including several multi-hundreds of million Euro deals with Sanofi.
But while the collaboration with Asahi Kasei is not a strategic partnership as yet, Hansen told us it “could become so as we continue to explore ways of growing our partnership.”
Evotec will use its drug discovery platform including medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry and in vitro pharmacology to optimise hit compounds identified and selected from its compound library collection through a recent high-throughput screening campaign.