Boehringer Expands Graffinity Drug Pact

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. has chosen to exercise options in its original agreement with Graffinity Pharmaceuticals that will increase the number of targets screened by Graffinity as part of this global alliance. Under the terms of the agreement, Graffinity will receive additional technology access fees for the generation of multiple small molecule hit series against a variety of drug targets from different therapeutic areas.

Graffinity will apply its fragment based drug discovery technology and drug fragment chemical microarrays to identify small molecule hit structures focusing on compounds with novel modes of action. Financial details were not disclosed.

Kristina Schmidt, chief executive officer of Graffinity, remarked, “Boehringer Ingelheim is taking full advantage of our proprietary process for rapidly identifying quality fragment hits. We believe that this collaboration is a validation of Graffinity’s approach of accelerating drug discovery through innovations in fragment based drug discovery.”