Evotec Wins NIH Award for SMR

Evotec has entered into a multi-year compound management agreement with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Health and Human Services, for the operation of a Small Molecule Repository. The contract, funded in its entirety by NIH, covers a period as long as 10 years and has a total estimated value of as much as $75 million.

The NIH Small Molecule Repository (SMR) contract will continue to provide services initiated previously under contract N01MH41001 to acquire, store, maintain, and distribute the current library collection, supporting certain NIH-supported screening Centers conducting high-throughput screening (HTS) for probe and drug discovery. As part of continuing efforts to expand and support translational science, this resource will now be made available to select outside collaborators, in addition to the NIH screening efforts/programs. Library development efforts will continue to shape, improve, and expand the collection.

Dr Mario Polywka, chief operating officer of Evotec, commented, “We are delighted the NIH has elected to award Evotec this long-term contract, which further validates our entry into compound management through our acquisition of Compound Focus Inc. in June 2011. This contract will be managed through our San Francisco subsidiary, however we are also currently developing options to expand our compound management capabilities into the east coast of the U.S. and also into Europe.”

The NIH Small Molecule Repository, initiated in 2004, was developed as part of the Molecular Libraries Program, an NIH Common Fund Initiative. The goals of the SMR are to identify, acquire, maintain, and distribute a collection of chemically diverse compounds with known and unknown biological activities for use in high-throughput screening (HTS). These compounds are intended to serve as starting material for the development of chemical probes to explore basic biology, as well as leads for therapeutics development.