Cerep's rational approach provides its pharmaceutical industry customers with new solutions for reducing the time and cost involved in the drug development process
Cerep operates in the drug discovery field with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as customers. The Company has developed an integrated technology platform designed for the implementation of a new drug discovery strategy. Cerep's rational approach provides its pharmaceutical industry customers with new solutions for reducing the time and cost involved in the drug development process, through the identification of the most promising candidate drugs at a very early stage, and the equally rapid elimination of those candidates which would not survive the development phase. Cerep employs a set of complementary technologies in the chemical, biological and informatics domains which the Company judges essential for efficient drug discovery.
In more precise terms, Cerep's integrated platform and knowhow cover:
- chemo-informatics for the design of "intelligent" compound libraries;
- combinatorial chemistry for compound library synthesis;
- medicinal chemistry for the design and synthesis of drug leads;
- high throughput screening (HTS) for rapid testing of large compound libraries;
- high throughput profiling (HTP) for determination of pharmacological effects (molecule specificity) and pharmaceutical effects (molecule bioavailability and toxicity);
- in vitro and in vivo preclinical tests for determining secondary and undesirable effects;
- BioPrintTM relational database, used to establish correlations first between chemical structures and in vitro and in vivo biological activities.
Cerep provides access to certain of its technologies in the form of services and by subscription to BioPrintTM.
The Company has also set up a number of long-term drug discovery collaboration agreements with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. These agreements provide for milestone payments at key stages in the research process, and payment of fees on sales of products resulting from the collaboration agreements. Cerep is currently running 8 such research collaboration programs in parallel with its partners.
Cerep customers and strategic partners consist primarily of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, but also include companies in the agrochemicals and chemicals sectors. Cerep had more than 170 customers including Glaxo-SmithKline, Aventis, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb (a BioPrintTM subscriber), Sanofi-Synthelabo, Roche, Japan Tobacco etc. |
