News Article

ChemCodes Inc and VM Discovery Announce a Strategic Alliance to Increase Molecular Diversity, Accuracy and Speed of Small Molecule Drug Discovery
Date: Aug 18, 2013
Author: press release
Source: PR Newswire ( click here to go to the source)

Featured firm in this article: VM Discovery Inc of Fremont, CA



PRNewswire/ -- ChemCodes Inc, a chemistry-driven drug discovery company, and
VM Discovery, Inc., a computational-driven drug discovery company, announce
the establishment of a strategic alliance. This alliance provides access to
and leverages each firm's proprietary technologies. The alliance will be used
for ChemCodes' internal drug discovery programs, respective corporate
partnership collaborations and for joint pursuit of selected drug discovery
programs. Financial terms are not disclosed.
"VM Discovery has built an excellent, proprietary portfolio of predictive
models which are the backbone of their computational contributions to scaffold
hopping, virtual design/screening of libraries and ADME TOX filtering that are
highly effective with our platform and medicinal chemistry process of
producing 'drug-like' leads and clinical candidates," indicates Bruce Scott,
Chief Business officer for ChemCodes Inc. Jie Q. (Jay) Wu, President and CEO
of VM Discovery stated that "ChemCodes' drug discovery platform provides next
generation technologies with Industry breakthrough capabilities in quality,
speed, molecular diversity, and parallel processing for targeted libraries and
combinatorial approaches." "The combining of these two leading technologies
will take us to a higher level of drug discovery capabilities and we are
looking forward to working with VM Discovery," says John Didsbury, CEO and
President of ChemCodes Inc.

ChemCodes is a small molecule drug discovery company that has developed a
proprietary high throughput medicinal chemistry discovery platform that
provides benefits of quality, novel compound diversity and speed. ChemCodes
is using its world-class technology for internal clinical compound development
and in collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to
create enabling chemical synthesis solutions for the discovery and development
of new medicinal compounds. The company currently is working on programs for
proprietary internal drug development in the therapeutic areas of Cancer,
Diabetes, and Inflammation. ChemCodes chemistry platform is pan-therapeutic
and supports the company's primary strategy, the pursuit of fast follower
products (novel analogues of marketed medicines) and compound renovation
products (early discovery compounds requiring chemistry improvements).

VM Discovery, Inc. ("VMD") is a privately held, venture-backed drug
discovery company in Silicon Valley, California. VMD has developed
proprietary drug design and optimization technology (the "VM Optimizer(TM)"),
based on integrated parallel multi-activity (potency and ADMET) modeling,
optimization and virtual screening, to discover new and improved patentable
small molecule drug leads. Multiple products within each project developed
using VM Optimizer(TM), through either "scaffold hopping" to find new chemical
entities or "drug recycling" to identify new indications of known drugs, are
not just more potent, selective but also with balanced ADMET (Absorption,
Distribution, Metabolism, Elimination and Toxicity) properties. VMD has been
developing a dozen of internal in-silico drug discovery projects in various
therapeutic areas, together with more than 15 in-house predictive in-silico
ADMET models based on chemical structures. Its commercial clients have already
validated some of these in in-vivo animal models of breast cancer and
cardiovascular diseases. VMD has already signed several drug discovery
collaboration deals with biotech and pharmaceutical companies in the US, Japan
and China. For more information, please contact Dr. Jay Wu at 510-413-5168 or
jay@vmdiscovery.com.

For additional information, please contact Bruce Scott, Chief Business
Officer, ChemCodes Inc at 919-641-2638 or bruce_scott@chemcodes.com.