Infinity Announces Small Molecule Alliance With Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development
Infinity Pharmaceuticals Inc. today announced that it has entered into a collaborative agreement enabling Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development, a division of Janssen Pharmaceutica N.V. (“J&JPRD”), to identify novel, small molecule therapeutic agents using Infinity’s novel compound collection. Infinity will provide J&JPRD with non-exclusive access to a proprietary collection of small molecules which J&JPRD may screen broadly against multiple targets and perform chemistry to identify small molecule drug leads. The industrialized nature of the Infinity platform enables it to be scaled for widespread use within J&JPRD to capitalize on the platform’s potential for broad therapeutic utility across numerous disease areas.
Under the terms of the agreement, J&JPRD pays an upfront license fee. Additionally, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, an affiliate of J&JPRD, has made an equity investment in Infinity. Other financial details were not disclosed.
“Infinity’s proprietary chemical technology platform offers J&JPRD a unique opportunity to combine our distinct chemistry prowess with their established research and development capabilities,” said Julian Adams, Chief Scientific Officer, Infinity. “This collaboration will ideally enable J&JPRD to identify breakthrough chemical compounds that will have great utility in the effort to address diseases with significant unmet medical need.”
“We are very excited to be working with J&JPRD, a highly regarded leader in the field of pharmaceuticals and healthcare,” said Adelene Perkins, Chief Business Officer, Infinity. “This alliance, our third within one year, highlights Infinity’s ability to successfully execute against our business model – a model that uniquely enables us to achieve the dual benefit of continuing to build our internal drug discovery efforts while also generating revenue. Complementing our internal drug discovery efforts, our plans for 2005 call for us to add one additional partner to whom we will grant access to the Infinity chemical technology platform and our proprietary compound collection.”
About Infinity’s Chemical Technology Platform
Infinity’s integrated team of synthetic, process, natural product, and combinatorial chemists have developed an industrialized technology platform to create a proprietary compound collection through the application of diversity-oriented synthesis (DOS).
DOS chemistry is a combinatorial synthetic approach (with all the virtues of combinatorial chemistry in terms of throughput) that is distinctive in terms of its output. While compounds produced through combinatorial approaches are usually relatively simple, “flat” molecules with no stereochemistry, DOS molecules are more complex, are three-dimensional, and feature multiple (completely controllable) stereocenters. These features have led many industry leaders to describe Infinity’s DOS molecules as natural product-like: they have the hallmarks of biologically active molecules previously only available from natural products without the drawbacks. This allows the Company to generate a unique library of pharmaceutically relevant compounds that not only cover a diverse area of current drug space, but can also be rapidly developed into drug candidates.
About Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Infinity is a fully integrated, cancer drug discovery company focused on pathways of cancer cell survival. In addition, through select partnerships, Infinity’s distinctive, proprietary collection of small molecules is being used against many of the world’s most important diseases.
