FORMA to collaborate with Cubist to develop novel antibacterial
drugs
9 February 2009
FORMA Therapeutics has signed a collaboration agreement with Cubist
Pharmaceuticals, Inc. to leverage FORMA’s transformative chemistry
platform to discover novel antibacterial compounds for development by
Cubist.
FORMA will receive an upfront payment, equity investment, payments
for compounds delivered and research funding over the three-year
collaboration term totalling up to $14 million and is eligible to
receive up to an additional $54 million in milestones plus royalties on
programs that Cubist elects to move into development and
commercialization.
“Working collaboratively with Cubist will allow us to demonstrate the
power of FORMA’s unique discovery platform to address the urgent need
for new chemical matter in the field of antibacterial research,” said
Steven Tregay, CEO of FORMA.
Steven Gilman, CSO/SVP Discovery and Non-Clinical Development of
Cubist said, “We are very excited to be collaborating with FORMA to
access their expertise in novel chemistry to address the large unmet
medical need in the area of antibacterial drug resistance, such as
methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and gram
negative infections.”
About FORMA’s integrated drug discovery platform
Some of the key features of FORMA’s discovery capabilities include:
- Versatile cell-based screening platform which allows the
screening of discrete targets in cells and quantitative
genome/proteome-wide profiling and target identification.
- Accessing new chemical space through structure-guided drug
discovery (SGDD) approaches leveraging proprietary computational and
structural biology combined with our integrated chemistry platform
which incorporates Diversity Orientated Synthesis (DOS). DOS
combines the high stereochemical and structural diversity found in
natural products with traditional combinatorial chemistry
techniques. This approach has been proven to work for challenging
targets and allows the rapid optimization of lead therapeutic
candidates.
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