Lion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. was established to focus on the discovery and development of small molecule therapeutics derived from molecular and genomic inventions emerging from major research universities. The Company's first contractual relationship was with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHU). Lion represented an entirely new approach to commercialising academic research discoveries. The Company entered into a long-term agreement with JHU whereby Lion, with the agreement of the specific faculty involved, has access to discoveries in genomic and disease-associated molecular targets for the pursuit of small molecule drugs. Lion established a small molecule drug discovery engine that was to be financially efficient by leveraging the investment in core drug discovery technology over multiple disease targets. The Company would add value to these discoveries by identifying and optimising lead pharmaceutical candidates arising from JHU and other universities, and work with major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to advance development or, occasionally, spin off relatively advanced platform technologies into new start-up companies Lion took advantage of drug discovery capabilities that have recently become available to both pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Technologies including combinatorial chemistry, bioinformatics and assay technologies, will be applied to rapidly evaluate and identify potential new drugs and targets emerging from Johns Hopkins and other biomedical research universities.
