Numerate Completes $4 Million Series A

Numerate, a biotechnology company leveraging a novel drug engineering process to design lead-stage drug compounds, announced today that it has completed a $4 million Series A.
From what I can tell, the company is working on the holy grail of in silico drug discovery. Add some inputs, out comes the list of compounds to synthesize. [...]

GSK and Cellzome Announce Alliance over Kinase Technology

Cellzome is a privately-owned drug discovery company identifying a new generation of kinase-targeted drugs to treat inflammatory diseases. Its pipeline of small-molecule therapeutics is driven by Kinobeads(TM), a proprietary technology for screening and profiling kinases in relevant cells and tissues.
Under the agreement GSK has exclusive options to license drug candidates from Cellzome’s kinase programs directed [...]

Wanna Know Why Drug Discovery/Development Is Hard?

FTY270 (fingolimod), an S1P1 modulator, is a T-cell specific immunosuppressant and is a hot, emerging phase III therapy for MS from Novartis (NVS). So where is the difficulty?
In the Aug. 14, 2008, issue of Nature, scientists from Emory University and the Yerkes Primate Research Center reported that, paradoxically, in a mouse model the drug [...]

Big Pharma Tries to Shake Things Up

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

GSK to shake-up research strategies (Financial Times)
UCSF, Pfizer sign collaborative research deal (San Fransisco Chronicle )
Both Via Pharmalot
It’s no secret that big pharma players have some work to do on their late-state pipeline and that they are collectively grasping at straws trying to bring in revenue.
Clearly, deciding to reorganize your [...]

Drug Development: From Discovery to NDA

Introduction
The time it takes from starting a program to selling a product can vary but is usually estimated to be around 10 years and the total cost associated with bringing a drug to market is widely cited to be at least $850 million. These numbers outline high stakes and whether you are an [...]