Sareum collaborates with Inpharmatica

Sareum Holdings, a structure-based UK drug discovery and services business, has entered into a collaborative agreement with Inpharmatica to express and determine the structures of novel, genomics-derived nuclear receptor protein targets to support the latter firm's drug discovery programs.

This collaboration represents a major new deal for the recently-floated Sareum and is on a fee-for-service basis. Under the terms of the deal, Sareum will receive significant upfront and substantial success payments and options to include further targets in the future, potentially representing more than 60% of the budgeted revenues for the current financial year to June 30, 2005.

Sareum will utilize its skills and high-throughput processes to clone, express and purify several of Inpharmatica's nuclear receptor targets and progress these through structure determination. Nuclear receptors are an important family of proteins of high therapeutic relevance in atherosclerosis, metabolic diseases, oncology, inflammation and central nervous system disorders, according to Sareum.