Serono and Inpharmatica continue collaboration

Inpharmatica, the selective drug discovery company, has extended its two-year collaboration with Serono, one of Europe's leading biotechnology company, for a further year.

The two companies entered into the original collaboration in July 2001. The new extension follows the expansion of the collaboration announced in January 2003. It provides further funding for a team of scientists at Inpharmatica to develop and apply the Company's computational chemogenomics system, PharmaCarta, to the identification of further novel proteins.

Importantly, the extension results from the success of the initial collaboration and comes shortly after the announcement, in June 2003, of Inpharmatica's first milestone payment from Serono. This payment was for the successful development of a novel secreted protein identified using PharmaCarta, one of over 150 novel putative proteins delivered to Serono to date. Under the terms of the extension agreement, Serono can select an unlimited number of novel proteins from those identified by Inpharmatica, for clinical development and commercialisation.

Commenting on the announcement Dr Malcolm Weir, ceo of Inpharmatica, said: 'Our collaboration with Serono has gone from strength to strength. The extension announced today validates both the quality of the work of our scientists and our PharmaCarta technology. Inpharmatica is fully committed to pushing the boundaries of functional genomics and to nurturing our relationships with our collaborators.'