Singapore, Jan 9, 2008: Faust Pharmaceuticals, a clinical-stage product company specializing in the discovery and development of drugs for diseases of the nervous system from France has entered into a research agreement with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Japan's largest pharmaceutical company.

 

Under the agreement, Faust will apply its NEUROCLID platform to identify novel drug candidates that target undisclosed G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) of interest to Takeda. Financial terms of the research agreement were not disclosed.

 

GPCRs constitute the most druggable class of targets. It has been estimated that approximately 30% of marketed drugs target GPCRs. Faust's NEUROCLID GPCR drug discovery platform is an innovative technology using Faust's proprietary library of over 4,000 fluorescent ligands sharing common GPCR pharmacophores to setup cell-based binding FRET (Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer) assays.

 

Mr Thomas Seoh, CEO of Faust Pharmaceuticals said, "The interactions between the Takeda and Faust research teams in planning these projects have been extremely high quality, and we very much look forward to applying our NEUROCLID GPCR platform to try to identify novel compounds and compound families for these promising GPCR targets."

 

Dr. Shigenori Ohkawa, General Manager of the Takeda Pharmaceutical Research Division said, "Faust's innovative NEUROCLID GPCR platform is a unique approach for discovering new chemical series for targeting challenging GPCRs and it is a promising example of state-of-the-art technologies that Takeda is willing to access from around the world in our search for novel drugs against these important drug targets."