Under the terms of the agreement, Merck will provide Nuevolution with an upfront payment, research funding and milestone payments as candidate molecules progress through preclinical and clinical development and onto the market. In addition, Nuevolution is eligible to receive royalties on the commercial sales of approved products.
Nuevolution will apply its proprietary Chemetics drug discovery technology to identify novel small molecule leads against several drug targets of interest to Merck. The Chemetics platform reportedly uses innovative DNA labeling to allow fragment-based drug screening at an unprecedented scale.
Nuevolution will screen multiple multimillion member diverse fragment based screening libraries for hit identification. Through the design, synthesis and screening of target focused Chemetics follow-up libraries, the parties will also work together to perform hit-to-lead optimization.