Evotec and Asahi Kasei up drug discovery collaboration

Evotec was selected by Tokyo, Japan-based Asahi Kasei to carry out a multi-target screening project on several ion channel targets in March 2015, but the collaboration is now being expanded into a fully integrated drug discovery project.

“The work at Evotec under this new agreement will be initiated with the hit compounds identified and selected HTS campaign executed at Evotec before,”​ Gabriele Hanson, spokesperson from the contract research organisation (CRO), told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.

“We will invest our staff resource and infrastructures to this collaboration.”​

The CRO has been pursuing a series of strategic partnerships with its customers over the past few years, including several multi-hundreds of million Euro deals with Sanofi​.

But while the collaboration with Asahi Kasei is not a strategic partnership as yet, Hansen told us it “could become so as we continue to explore ways of growing our partnership.”​

Evotec will use its drug discovery platform including medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry and in vitro pharmacology to optimise hit compounds identified and selected from its compound library collection through a recent high-throughput screening campaign.