BioFocus and InterMed Discovery Announce Marketing Collaboration

IMD will make its natural product screening libraries available and provide follow-on services to BioFocus. BioFocus will then incorporate these as part of its own integrated drug discovery offerings.

Jul 19 2011 --- BioFocus, an integrated drug discovery service partner, and InterMed Discovery GmbH (IMD), a natural product lead-discovery company, announced a marketing collaboration to offer enhanced natural product discovery to the pharmaceutical, animal health, and agrochemical industries. No financial details were disclosed.

Under the terms of the collaboration, IMD will make its natural product screening libraries available and provide follow-on services to BioFocus. BioFocus will then incorporate these as part of its own integrated drug discovery offerings. BioFocus has a track record of service deals with industry for the discovery of active ingredients in pharmaceutical, animal health and agrochemical applications.

“We believe that the combination of our natural product capabilities with the well known discovery capabilities of BioFocus will offer a powerful discovery solution at a time when there is already growing demand from the pharma, veterinary and agro industries to fill depleted pipelines,“ said Dr. Thomas Henkel, co-Managing Director of InterMed Discovery.

“We have been impressed with the scale of IMDs natural product discovery capabilities and we believe that when InterMed’s natural product libraries and services are combined with our screening services, our engine for drug discovery will be substantially enhanced and more cost-effective for our clients,” added Dr. Chris Newton, Managing Director, BioFocus.

Originally developed within Bayer Healthcare AG, the IMD natural product integrated discovery platform consists of the largest natural compound libraries available to industry and a powerful combination of rich databases of data and research relating to natural compounds. Together with BioFocus’ screening technologies and integrated discovery capabilities, they amount to a strong platform in the discovery of biologically functional natural compounds.

InterMed Discovery is a world class natural product lead-discovery company, driving innovation through the generation of novel product candidates for the life science, food and cosmetics industries. Using one of the most powerful validated natural product discovery engines, InterMed Discovery generates proprietary product pipelines of functional ingredients and also supports partners in research and lead generation. Biologically characterised product leads are identified using IMD BIOPROFILING and NPSilico, which together comprise a proprietary bioinformatics platform drawing on screening results compiled over many years, complemented by primary biological and chemical research on natural products. InterMed Discovery adds to this the industry’s largest collections of pure compounds, sample fractions and mixtures as its source for potential natural product leads. The Company is located in Dortmund, Germany and was founded in 2006 as a management buyout of the Natural Products Research Unit of Bayer Healthcare. IMD entered into strategic cooperations with companies such as Cognis GmbH (now BASF SE) and Biotropics Malaysia Berhad. Further information on InterMed Discovery can be found at www.intermed-discovery.com.

BioFocus delivers drug discovery solutions through a comprehensive platform run by dedicated teams with a track record in gene-to-clinical candidate discovery. BioFocus’ offering includes target discovery in human primary cells, focused and diverse compound libraries, in vitro and cell-based screening, structural biology, medicinal chemistry and ADME/PK services, supported by unique chemogenomic and informatics tools.