Aventis Licenses Sertanty Kinase Knowledgebase

San Jose, Calif. – February 23, 2004 – Sertanty, Inc., a provider of software solutions and content for the drug discovery industry, is pleased to announce today that Aventis Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NYSE:AVE) purchased a global license to its Kinase Knowledgebase for use in their preclinical research programs in the field of kinases. In addition, Aventis licensed Sertanty’s LUCIA™ technology, a web-based search interface which facilitates retrieval of relevant research information.

 

“The Knowledgebase covers the kinase gene family and provides access to structure activity data from scientific literature, journal articles and patents,” explained Steven Muskal, Ph.D., Sertanty Chief Technology Officer.  “LUCIA™, our flagship product, is a cheminformatics and drug discovery platform that enables medicinal chemists to rapidly discover patentable new lead compounds. Its unique search interface makes it easy to understand the patent space around any given target, browse and compare inhibitors by their chemical structure or target and identify high quality data points for training sets. Under the product licenses, these technologies will support Aventis’ researchers in France, Germany and the United States. ”

 

Sertanty’s Kinase Knowledgebase is designed to assist medicinal chemists throughout the compound discovery process. Sertanty works closely with its clients to ensure that they receive all the relevant information around their targets and anti-targets. At present, the knowledgebase contains 85,000 SAR data points for more than 100 targets.

 

Sertanty’s LUCIA™ technology supports the drug discovery process at all stages.  At the project start, Sertanty’s knowledgebase provides a comprehensive overview on published knowledge and patents around the target and anti-targets. The presentation of the structural data makes it easy to group known inhibitors in scaffold groups and lay out a project plan around patentable chemotypes.

 

In the lead discovery and optimization phase, Sertanty’s LUCIA™ technology helps to prioritize compounds for synthesis or purchase based on their predicted properties. Using its high quality content, Sertanty developed 46 kinase specific eScreen™ modules for potency and selectivity prediction, lead optimization and scaffold jumping.

 

The platform can be used by every scientist in the drug discovery team without special training in computational sciences.

 

Sertanty’s Knowledgebases and LUCIA™ technology platform are available for license by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.  For more information, please contact Kristina Kurz, Ph.D., (408) 487 4015 or [email]kkurz@sertanty.com.[/email]

 

 

About Sertanty, Inc.
Sertanty, Inc. is a drug discovery technology company that uses advanced empirical data and computational techniques to discover novel small molecules that can be transformed into orally-available drugs. The company’s technology has the potential to significantly reduce the chemical synthesis efforts involved in discovering new small-molecule drugs by leveraging known molecular structures, synthesis protocols and bioactivity data.  Sertanty’s senior management team has substantial corporate and operating expertise in profitable information technology companies such as Sun Microsystems and Brocade Communications, as well as successful life sciences companies such as Affymax and MDL Information Systems.  The company recently completed its seed financing, led by leading life science and information technology investors HighBAR Ventures, Band of Angels and Technofyn.  Sertanty is well positioned to expand its operations through revenues from software and content licenses.  Sertanty is based in San Jose, California.  For more information, please visit:
http://www.sertanty.com.