Astex announces new drug discovery collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim
Cambridge, UK, 31st August 2005
Astex Therapeutics today announced a new drug discovery alliance with Boehringer Ingelheim to discover, develop and commercialize novel drug candidates against undisclosed targets in different therapeutic areas.
Astex will be responsible for providing drug candidates to Boehringer Ingelheim which, in turn, will be responsible for progressing the candidates through development and onto the market. Under the terms of the new agreement, Boehringer Ingelheim will provide Astex with an upfront payment in return for access to its proprietary fragment-based drug discovery technology, research funding, and milestone payments as candidate molecules progress through preclinical and clinical development and onto the market. In addition, Astex is eligible to receive royalties on the commercial sales of approved products.
Professor Mikael Dolsten, Head of Corporate Division Pharma Research/Discovery at Boehringer Ingelheim, said: “Our existing drug discovery collaboration with Astex has been successful and complemented our in-house capabilities. We look forward to continuing our relationship through this new collaboration and working with Astex on a number of important additional drug targets.”
Tim Haines, Chief Executive of Astex, commented: “We are delighted to be able to extend our relationship with Boehringer Ingelheim following the success of our existing collaboration which began in 2003, and we look forward to continuing to deliver novel drug candidates in our new collaboration.”
About Astex
Astex is a biotechnology company producing novel small molecule therapeutics. Using its pioneering fragment-based drug discovery approach, Astex has rapidly established a broad pipeline of next generation, molecularly-targeted oncology drugs, the first of which entered into Phase I in August 2005 in the USA and UK.
Astex’s leading position in fragment-based drug discovery derives from its integrated discovery engine, PyramidTM. High-throughput X-ray crystallography and other biophysical techniques are used to identify drug fragments bound to target proteins and to transform the fragments, using efficient medicinal chemistry, into potent, selective drug candidates. PyramidTM has been successfully applied across a wide variety of therapeutic targets, including those regarded as ‘intractable’ by the pharmaceutical industry, resulting in lead compounds for the potential treatment of cancer, inflammation and Alzheimer’s disease.
Astex’s unprecedented productivity in lead discovery has been endorsed by drug discovery alliances with major pharmaceutical companies including Astellas Pharma, AstraZeneca, sanofi-aventis, Berlex, Boehringer Ingelheim, Mitsubishi Pharma and Schering AG. Astex was established in 1999 and is well financed by leading, blue chip US and European investors (Abingworth, Advent International, Alta Partners, Apax, GIMV, HypoVereinsbank, Oxford Bioscience Partners, Schering AG and the University of Cambridge).
For further information on Astex please visit the Company’s website at www.astex-therapeutics.com
About Boehringer Ingelheim
The Boehringer Ingelheim group is one of the world’s 20 leading pharmaceutical companies. Headquartered in Ingelheim, Germany, it operates globally with 144 affiliates in 45 countries and nearly 36,000 employees. Since it was founded in 1885, the family-owned company has been committed to researching, developing, manufacturing and marketing novel products of high therapeutic value for human and veterinary medicine. In 2004, Boehringer Ingelheim posted net sales of 8.2 billion euro while spending nearly one fifth of net sales in its largest business segment Prescription Medicines on research and development.
For more information please visit www.boehringer-ingelheim.com