Pharmacopeia splits and continues with Celgene

US biotech company Pharmacopeia, Inc has said that the proposed spin-off of its Pharmacopeia Drug Discovery (PDD) unit is expected to occur by the end of April 2004.

Pharmacopeia will, subject to stockholder approval at its upcoming annual meeting, change its name to Accelrys to better reflect its focus on the scientific software business. The transaction remains subject to Pharmacopeia's receipt of regulatory approvals and a favorable tax opinion, market conditions and final approval by the Pharmacopeia Board.

The company has also extended and expanded its research collaboration with Celgene Corporation, following on from the successful collaboration between the corporations that resulted in a milestone payment to Pharmacopeia in 2003.

In the new collaboration, the companies will work together to identify promising small molecule lead compounds suitable for further development against a range of critical targets identified by Celgene.

Under the terms of this agreement, Pharmacopeia will utilise its proprietary collection of over 7.5m drug-like small molecules, its considerable expertise in assay development and miniaturisation and its high-throughput and ultra-high-throughput screening capabilities to identify leads against selected Celgene targets. Pharmacopeia will receive funding for providing these research activities and will be entitled to receive additional payments upon the successful achievement of milestones, and royalties upon the commercialisation of any drugs resulting from the collaboration.

'We are delighted that an organisation of the calibre of Celgene has chosen to extend and expand its collaboration with Pharmacopeia,' said Dr Stephen Spearman,coo of Pharmacopeia. 'We believe their further commitment is testament to the value Pharmacopeia offers our partners through our collaborative discovery model by applying both our expertise and our unique drug discovery assets.'

Who is Pharmacopeia?

Pharmacopeia is a leader in enabling science and technology that accelerates and improves the drug discovery and chemical development processes. Pharmacopeia's Drug Discovery business (PDD) integrates proprietary small molecule combinatorial and medicinal chemistry, high-throughput screening, in-vitro pharmacology, computational methods and informatics to discover and optimise lead compounds. Pharmacopeia's software subsidiary, Accelrys, develops and commercialises molecular modeling and simulation software for the life sciences and materials research markets, cheminformatics and decision support systems, and bioinformatics tools including gene sequence analysis.