Kinases are an important class of drug targets often pursued by the pharmaceutical industry because of the vital role they play in regulating cancer and inflammatory diseases.
Under the terms of the agreement, Cellzome will have access to kinase libraries owned by Galapagos’ service division BioFocus DPI. The Galapagos subsidiary will also provide biological screening and chemistry expertise to find inhibitors of Cellzome’s kinase targets.
In return BioFocus DPI will receive an upfront payment for the library access as well as research fees.
“We chose to work with BioFocus DPI because of the high quality of their SoftFocus kinase libraries and their specific expertise in screening. This allowed us to transfer our Kinobeads assay rapidly, and begin to identify small molecule inhibitors of particular kinase targets,” said Tim Edwards, CEO at Cellzome.