Graffinity and Boehringer Ingelheim enter into drug discovery research agreement

Graffinity Pharmaceuticals, of Heidelberg in Germany, has entered into a research collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. which involves four global research sites of Boehringer Ingelheim.

Under the terms of the agreement, Graffinity will receive technology access fees and success payments for the generation of various novel small molecule hit series against multiple drug targets.

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

'This collaboration again demonstrates that Graffinity's technology is one of the most important and reliable alternatives to standard approaches of identifying NCEs,' said Mathias Woker, senior vice president of business development at Graffinity. 'Our fragment-based drug discovery platform and process are uniquely suited for challenging drug targets, since our drug fragment libraries, together with the proprietary label- and assay-free high-throughput imaging technology, allow us to generate quality hit structures for both known as well as novel modes of action - thus exploiting completely new avenues in chemical diversity space.'