Nuevolution seals US discovery deal

Collaboration agreed

Nuevolution A/S of Copenhagen, Denmark, has agreed a strategic alliance with Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, Inc, for the discovery of novel small molecule lead compounds for highly validated drug targets.

Under the terms of the alliance, the Medicon Valley company’s Chemetics drug discovery technology will be applied to identify leads against a range of targets proposed by Lexicon. Nuevolution will receive an upfront payment and will be eligible for milestone payments and royalties. The Danish company will also have the option to expand its involvement in certain programs under a cost and profit sharing arrangement.

The Chemetics fragment-based platform technology enables both hit identification and hit-to-lead optimisation by exploration of ultra-large chemistry space through the screening of multiple fragment-based small molecule libraries of more than 100 million compounds per library.

The targets in the collaboration have been identified through Lexicon’s Genome5000 programme, in which the company explored the physiological and behavioural function of nearly 5,000 human genes by studying the corresponding mouse genes in knockout animals. This led to the identification of more than 100 highly validated drug targets that Lexicon is using to build its clinical pipeline.

“Our proprietary Chemetics platform uses innovative DNA labelling to allow fragment-based drug screening at an unprecedented scale,” said Alex Gouliaev, CEO of Nuevolution. “We believe this generates high quality hits and leads far more rapidly and reliably than current ultra high throughput methods.”