Almirall enters integrated discovery agreement with Proteros

Spain’s largest pharma company Almirall (ALM. MC) and privately-held German firm Proteros biostructures GmbH have entered into a research collaboration to identify small molecule inhibitors against a target selected by Almirall in the field of inflammatory diseases. Financial terms of the accord were not disclosed.

Under the deal, Proteros will apply its protein structure-based drug discovery platform. Proprietary site specific screening technologies, novel fragment libraries and structural biology will be deployed to support medicinal chemistry objectives of the program, to identify and optimize for selectivity and potency small molecule inhibitors of a specific enzyme.

Commenting on the alliance, Jorge Beleta, director discovery strategy and alliances at Almirall, said: “we have worked with and been impressed by Proteros for many years on our structural biology and compound profiling projects and we see this broadening of our relationship to fully integrated projects as an exciting next step.”