Astellas and Daiichi Sankyo share 400,000 compounds in research agreement

Japanese drug majors Astellas Pharma (TYO: 4503) and Daiichi Sankyo (TYO: 4568) will form a compound library sharing partnership for approximately 400,000 selected compounds. This is the first time that a compound library partnership of this scale has been formed in Japan and it aims to promote new medicine research and development.

The companies have compound libraries that are the basis for their drug discovery research, and through high throughput screening (HTS), the companies can quickly search for potentially beneficial compounds to develop new drugs. This partnership will give each company access to qualitatively different compound libraries - which have been developed based on the targeting disease strategies of each company - allowing both companies to implement broader HTS to generate new drugs.

Commercialization agreement