Sunday, June 13, 2010

1st milestone reached by Emerald Biostructures in its collaboration with UCB to discover and develop novel anti-inflammatory drugs

Emerald Biostructures announced this week that it has successfully achieved the first milestone in its collaboration with UCB on the structure-based discovery of small molecule modulators of undisclosed cytokine targets. 


Working in close collaboration, the team of researchers at Emerald and UCB has gained high resolution X-ray crystallographic structures of small fragment-like molecules that antagonize inflammatory cytokine signaling. 

“Emerald and UCB initiated their innovative collaboration partnership in January of 2009 and in a little over a year have arrived at breakthrough insights. Emerald’s insights are highly enabling to inform structure-guided medicinal chemistry efforts for novel cytokine signaling antagonists,” said Neil Weir, Sr. VP of Research at UCB. 

This milestone is another example of Emerald BioStructures’ fragment-based X-ray structure technology used in lead discovery.  

“In this collaborative effort, we’ve identified allosteric modulators of protein structure,” said Alex Burgin, COO of Emerald BioStructures. “We look forward to moving on to achieve our next milestone with UCB."

Learn more at http://www.emeraldbiostructures.com/


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