Saturday, October 29, 2016
Amyris, Inc., the industrial bioscience company, is pleased to announce it has entered into a research agreement with a commercial license option with one of the top 10 largest global pharmaceutical companies. Under the terms of the agreement, the collaboration will use Amyris's µPharmTM platform technology to develop a customized library of natural and natural-like compounds to test its partner's target antibiotic therapeutic.
Nature has been a great source for therapeutics, ranging from antibiotics to statins that lower cholesterol levels; however, Nature's potential is often under-utilized due to scarcity or unavailability. Amyris's µPharm platform technology enables an integrated discovery and production process for therapeutic compounds. It not only provides access to scarce natural compounds, but also creates new diversity based on natural compound scaffolds.
"We're pleased to have executed our second large µPharm collaboration during the second half of 2016 as planned," said John Melo, Amyris President and CEO. "We are continuing to experience significant momentum in our business and within biopharma alone we have now executed agreements with three of the top companies in the industry, each leaders in their fields."
"Adding another top pharmaceutical company partner to our collaboration portfolio demonstrates the robust growth opportunity we see in the space," said Cynthia Bryant, Amyris Senior Vice President Corporate Development & Collaborations. "The flexibility and power of Amyris's technology platform can be harnessed for a variety of applications and within biopharma can open a new area of compounds that have never been accessible for new drug discovery."
Amyris will utilize the µPharm platform technology to develop a library of natural and natural-like compounds and test the efficacy of those compounds in vivo for hits against the identified target. This is a different approach than traditional high throughput screening, which typically applies thousands of chemical compounds in in vitro screens to find a drug candidate. Instead, the µPharm platform starts with the target to improve efficiency, identifies candidate natural compound structures, and then creates diversity around those structures for in vivo testing.
Source : investors.amyris.com
