The new agreement expands the collaboration that has been going on for the last three years, and roughly doubles the FTE effort at ChemDiv’s Chemical Diversity Research Institute in Moscow.
Under the terms of the agreement, a steering committee with representatives from the companies will determine projects to be produced by ChemDiv for early stage discovery at Merck. Promising hits will then be further optimized and placed into Merck’s discovery pipeline. Financial terms were not disclosed.
“We are proud that Merck decided to double the effort in our Moscow Institute, where we have established one of the largest drug discovery research centers in Eastern Europe, with emphasis on preclinical discovery research including high throughput chemistry and biology,” stated Nikolay Savchuk, president of ChemDiv.