In January 2005, it was announced that Schering-Plough (NYSE:SGP), a developer and marketer of pharmaceutical products, entered into an agreement to acquire most assets of NeoGenesis Pharmaceuticals, a developer of small molecule-based drugs using a chemical genomics platform. NeoGenesis is focused on applying advanced genomic techniques in conjunction with traditional techniques involving novel solution phase small molecule combinatorial libraries and highly sensitive screening methodologies to develop drugs against infectious diseases and therapeutics for human diseases associated with damaged or mutant genes. The firm is using its chemical genomics strategy to discover small molecule drugs on a genome-wide scale. The company's scalable drug discovery technologies rapidly identify high-quality pre-clinical drug candidates for virtually any disease-associated protein discovered by genomic or proteomics research. NeoGenesis' core technology, the Automated Ligand Identification System (ALIS), is a scalable, generic, affinity-based system for rapidly screening disease-associated targets. This ligand identification strategy does not require any knowledge of protein function or assay development. Coupled with the company's NeoMorph compound library, consisting of more than 10 million diverse medicinally relevant small molecules, ALIS identifies small molecule ligands exhibiting high affinity and high selectivity against many protein classes. By identifying biologically active ligands, NeoGenesis' technologies simultaneously validate a disease-associated protein as a useful drug target and deliver small molecule drug leads, accelerating the drug discovery process. NeoGenesis has developed partnerships and collaborative research agreements with many of the world's leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, including: Aventis Pharma, Biogen, Celltech, Immusol, Merck, Mitsubishi Pharma, Oxford GlycoSciences, Pharmacia, Schering-Plough and Tularik
