Evotec OAI to Expand Agreement with Oxford Bioscience Partners

Evotec OAI AG, a leading partner for integrated high-value- added drug discovery and development solutions to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, and Oxford Bioscience Partners (OBP), Boston, USA, a premier life-sciences venture capital firm, announced today that they have expanded their 2002 agreement by integrating Evotec OAI’s newly established rational drug design platform, EVOrationale™. Evotec OAI has recently built up its EVOrationale™ platform consisting of protein engineering and production, X-ray crystallography and computational chemistry to assist their customers in delivering de novo structure determination, validation of screening hits and structure guided lead optimization programs. The platform has been fully integrated into the company’s world-class drug discovery and development capabilities including screening, medicinal chemistry and ADMET profiling. Over the past months, Evotec OAI has successfully applied the new platform to a range of targets including kinases, GPCRs, proteases, enzymes and more complex protein-ligand interactions. Bernard Questier, Chief Business Officer at Evotec OAI, said: “Evotec OAI has a long-standing track record in developing superior knowledge-driven drug discovery solutions. With the recent build-up of our computational chemistry capabilities including a database of more than 5.5 million compounds for virtual screening purposes and a dedicated structural biology group, we are uniquely positioned to offer high quality, high speed integrated structure-guided drug discovery programs to our partners.”

Philip Borden at Oxford Bioscience Partners added: “Since inception of our collaboration we are highly impressed by Evotec OAI’s drug discovery and development capabilities and have successfully used Evotec OAI in seven of our portfolio companies. With this additional offering, Evotec OAI clearly brings our portfolio companies significant value-added capabilities in the area of structural biology.”