With a focus on discovery and development of molecularly-targeted drugs in areas of unmet medical need, especially oncology, Astex Therapeutics applies its proprietary fragment-based Pyramid™ drug discovery engine to deliver a broad pipeline of products in both clinical and preclinical phases.

Astex’ lead drug candidate, AT7519, is a cell cycle inhibitor that entered clinical development in the middle of 2005. Astex’s second drug candidate, AT9283, an aurora kinase inhibitor, received IND approval to commence clinical development in April 2006. Jeremy Carmichael, Director of Business Development at Astex Therapeutics spoke to Pharmalicensing about his views on the service since joining a few years ago.

“”Pharmalicensing is a well-known name in the industry as an online partnering tool which is why we first started to use the site.”

Now an established profiling company on the site, Astex finds the regular outreach to the biopharma community and frequent information on up-to-date licensing opportunities as the major reasons why it continues to profile with Pharmalicensing. “Pharmalicensing is generally regarded as one of the better sites in the industry to facilitate partnering,” stated Dr Carmichael. “Although Astex does not use Pharmalicensing as its only way of finding potential partners, the service does provide us with one convenient way to communicate our licensing opportunities to a wide audience and has also given us some up-to-date leads about new technologies and companies that we can follow up.”

Astex appreciates the way that Pharmalicensing’s partnering service is pro-active, each time a company revises its profile on the site, this generates new email alerts, informing the industry of recent changes. “Even when the profile isn’t regularly altered, the company and its licensing opportunities can still attract attention,” Dr Carmichael commented, a feature that is no doubt useful for business and licensing executives with little time on their hands for advertising.

Dr Carmichael is pleased with Astex’ profile and the leads it has generated and sees Pharmalicensing as an important shop window for biotech and pharma companies to feed through new opportunities.