LION bioscience & Bayer Pioneer Linkage Between Chemistry & Genomics To Speed Life Science Discovery

18-Jul-2001

In a deal that marks the beginning of the integration between genomics and the chemical sciences, LION bioscience AG (Neuer Markt: LIO, Nasdaq: LEON), and Bayer AG (Dax: BAY) announced today that they have expanded their existing bioinformatics IT-partnership into the field of pharmacophore informatics. As a key feature, pharmacophore informatics will identify the relevant structural elements present in the increasing amounts of biological and chemical structures that are being delivered by today's numerous high-throughput systems. As the overall project leader, LION will coordinate the development of the novel pharmacophore informatics platform. In close collaboration with Tripos, Inc. (Nasdaq: TRPS), a leading developer of cheminformatics solutions, LION will develop and deploy the tools, methods and systems for the field of cheminformatics to that platform. The extended system will improve Bayer's ability to identify, select and optimize the most promising drug and plant protection candidates. The deal represents a major advance in the approach Life Science companies are adapting to systematically improve the decision support for selecting optimal development candidates.

"Developing an efficient and integrated system for accessing all of the know-how housed in databases across Bayer's Life Science business groups, that can also be crosslinked with genomic information from internal and public sources, will greatly improve our decision making processes and to enter new areas of active substance discovery,” said Dr. Pol Bamelis, Member of the Board of Management of Bayer AG and Chairman of the company's Board Committee for Research and Development. "By expanding our collaboration with LION as our strategic partner in the field of Life Science R&D we expect significant synergy effects at each step of our research process, from hit selection to identification of the most promising candidate.” "The pressure to analyze the increasing volumes of targets and chemicals is driving the need for more intelligent and integrated solutions,” said LION's Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Friedrich von Bohlen. "We have had great success working with Bayer in furnishing high-grade targets and in shaping Bayer's bio-IT infrastructure. Together with Tripos we began in 1998 to develop systems that enable the integration and analysis of the two complex and diverse disciplines, genomics and chemistry. Integrating cheminformatics to our knowledge management systems is the next logical component in the continued growth of our i-biology™ solution for the needs of the Life Science industry's whole R&D cycle.”

Under the terms of this benchmark agreement, Bayer will make an approximately USD $25 million payment in the form of an up-front payment, technology licensing fee, R&D funding and milestone payments between now and March 2003. LION together with Tripos will retain all rights for the immediate resale of the software systems and solutions developed during the collaboration.

"Converting the huge amount of data generated by high throughput drug discovery processes into information and knowledge requires the integration of chemistry. This is the next major bottleneck in pharmaceutical drug and crop protection development,” said Prof. Wolfgang Hartwig, Executive Vice President of International Pharma Research at Bayer and Chairman of the companies Life Science Research Committee. "The volume of new biological data being generated is unprecedented, and it is only through the intelligent marriage of biology and chemistry that this new knowledge will be turned into products. Through our partnership with LION we will establish the necessary IT-technology which will enable us to better utilize our steadily growing amount of data to identify the key elements in pharmacophore structures that cause selective biological activity.

https://www.chemeurope.com/en/news/3952/lion-bioscience-bayer-pioneer-linkage-between-chemistry-genomics-to-speed-life-science-discovery.html