Milestone transition in Astex Alzheimer’s Disease collaboration with AstraZeneca

In the collaboration, Astex applied its fragment based drug discovery approach, Pyramid™, to identify novel lead compounds inhibiting the target. AstraZeneca is responsible for progressing the selected candidate drug through clinical development and eventually onto the market.

Harren Jhoti, Chief Executive Officer of Astex, commented: “We are delighted that AstraZeneca has chosen to progress a candidate drug from this exciting programme addressing a significant area of unmet medical need. This is the second candidate drug to have been announced from one of our partnered programmes in the last year. This latest announcement confirms the potential of the fragment-based drug discovery approach and the productivity of our platform, and underscores Astex’s leadership position in this area.”

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Astex is a UK-based biotechnology company that discovers and develops novel small molecule therapeutics. Using its pioneering fragment-based drug discovery platform Pyramid™, Astex has built a pipeline of five molecularly-targeted oncology drugs, of which three are currently being tested in clinical trials and two are in pre-clinical development.

In addition to its proprietary research programmes, Astex’s productivity in lead discovery has been endorsed through numerous partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, Bayer-Schering, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson.