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NewswireToday - /newswire/ -
Chengdu, Sichuan, China, 2012/12/23 - HitGen and Viva Biotech announce a strategic alliance- the two companies will collaborate to provide a fully-integrated drug discovery service, with the partnership focusing on early hit to lead generation, accelerating client drug discovery projects.
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HitGen Ltd, a rapidly developing lead generation services company to the global biopharmaceutical industry, and Viva Biotech Ltd, a well established and internationally known leading company in structure-based drug discovery services, today announced they have entered into a strategic alliance. Under the terms of the agreement, HitGen and Viva Biotech will collaborate to provide a fully-integrated drug discovery services, with collaboration focus on early hit to lead generation, to accelerate their clients’ drug discovery projects from targets into early development. Hit identification is a notable missing piece in preclinical drug discovery capability in China and this alliance is expected to fulfill.
Dr Jin Li, Chairman and Chief Executive Offer at HitGen said,“We are pleased to have formed a strategic alliance with Viva Biotech. Over the past 5 years, they have established a reputation for high-quality preparation and characterization of a large number of potential recombinant drug targets, assay development and structure-based drug discovery. HitGen is a rapidly developing lead generation company with world class library and strong capabilities in in vitro biology, medicinal and synthetic chemistry and computational sciences. In a very short period of time, using encoded library technology, we have established sizeable small molecule compound libraries and the associated screening platform for hit and lead generation. By effective combination of the expertise and experience from the strategic partnership and working closely together with our customers, who will be experts in their particular therapeutic project field, we expect to provide clear added value to their projects and help to provide accelerated project progression. My colleagues and I are looking forward to working with the Viva Biotech team to offer an outstanding fully-integrated drug discovery research services to our customers.”
Commenting on the partnership, Dr Cheney Mao, Viva Biotech’s CEO said,“HitGen has set up and rapidly made a large high quality encoded library for hit or tool compound identification which is a capability unavailable to date in China. Viva Biotech is working on several hundred potential drug targets for several dozen major pharmaceutical companies every year and there are a large number of targets which would need selective lead or tool compounds for target validation and drug discovery. At Viva Biotech, we strongly believe that collaborations between specialist companies can deliver enhanced value to customers. By working with HitGen, we will be able to offer our existing and new customers the opportunities to access HitGen’s large chemical libraries and screening capabilities. Coupling this with Viva’s established scientific capabilities in recombinant protein production, structural biology and preclinical capabilities, we believe the alliance will maximize strengths from both companies to offer our customers accelerated services from targets to candidate drugs.”
HitGen Ltd is a life science company based in Chengdu, China. We are an innovation-driven and customer-focused company. HitGen aims to establish a unique platform and associated capabilities for drug discovery research.With a focus on hit identification and lead generation during the early phase of drug discovery R&D, we have our core capabilities in medicinal chemistry, chemical library design and synthesis, in vitro screening and selection. Employing 70 scientists, HitGen has built a core platform for progressing projects from targets to the leads stage, including high quality and large compound libraries (encoded and discrete), screening and selection, and informatics analysis and design.
Based in Shanghai, China Viva Biotech is one of the few biology-focused CROs providing preclinical drug discovery research services. Viva is privately owned and financed by leading investors in the US. It currently employs close to 200 scientists at a 65,000 sq. ft. research center. The center is equipped with state-of-the-art instruments housed by modern laboratories in an artistically designed building. Viva now works with all of the top ten largest global pharmaceutical companies and dozens of small to medium sized US and Europe-based businesses in studies of gene-to-structure, in vitro and in vivo assays, target ID, ADME, animal models, and more.
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