Nuevolution Receives Milestone Payment From Boehringer Ingelheim

Nuevolution A/S recently announced that it has received a milestone payment derived from its collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim. The payment was triggered following identification of potent small molecule compounds that have been shown to disrupt the protein-protein interaction of an undisclosed therapeutic target.

In its collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, Nuevolution is applying its proprietary Chemetics technology to identify novel small molecule leads against drug targets of interest to Boehringer Ingelheim. Nuevolution has so far screened about 300 million small molecules against the first of the targets selected under the collaboration.

The Chemetics platform uses innovative DNA labeling to allow fragment-based drug screening at an unprecedented scale forming small molecules and synthetic biologics. In existing collaborations, Nuevolution has successfully identified drug-like small molecules for several challenging target classes, including enzymes and protein-protein interactions.

“We are very pleased about the results that have been obtained thus far in the collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim. The use of ultra large libraries under the optimized work flow implemented by Nuevolution during the last couple of years, has allowed the rapid identification of interesting compounds for this target,” said Alex Gouliaev, CEO of Nuevolution A/S. “The current results provides a promising basis for the further compound optimization.”

Boehringer Ingelheim and Nuevolution entered into the collaboration in September 2011.

Nuevolution is a leading small molecule lead discovery company founded in 2001 and based in Copenhagen, Denmark. The company has developed Chemetics, a unique, patent-protected hybrid of proven wet chemistry and molecular biology, which represents the ultimate fragment-based drug discovery technology. Chemetics enables rapid synthesis and DNA-tagging of hundreds of millions of chemically diverse drug-like small molecule compounds and the efficient screening of these, facilitating the identification of potent drug leads at unprecedented quantity, quality, and speed compared to existing drug discovery technologies. Nuevolution’s library collection currently exceeds 1 billion small molecule compounds and synthetic biologics for screening.

Nuevolution partners its technology with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The company has entered into agreements with Merck & Co., Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis Pharma, and Boehringer Ingelheim. It has also entered into a joint venture consortium between Nuevolution, EpiTherapeutics, ExpreS2ion Biotechnologies, and Professor Kristian Helin (Biotech Research & Innovation Centre, University of Copenhagen) aiming at discovery and development of novel small molecule drugs against epigenetic factors. Nuevolution has demonstrated the power of Chemetics by identifying highly potent and drug-like novel ligands with the potential to address major unmet medical needs across a range of therapeutic areas and target classes. For more information, visit www.nuevolution.com.