Milestone
Nuevolution A/S of Copenhagen has announced that it has received a milestone payment derived under its collaboration with Merck. The payment follows the discovery of several candidate molecules.
In the collaboration, Nuevolution is applying its Chemetics technology to identify novel small-molecule leads against drug targets of interest to Merck.
To date the Danish company has screened more than one billion small-molecules against the first of the targets. The candidate molecules so far identified have been shown to disrupt an undisclosed, therapeutically relevant, protein-protein interaction in vitro.
“Considering the complexity of the target, we believe that the results demonstrate the value of having access to hundreds of millions to billions of small molecules for screening,” said Alex Gouliaev, CEO of Nuevolution.
Merck and Nuevolution entered into a collaboration in 2008. In April 2009, Nuevolution announced an expansion to the second phase of the collaboration.
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