Sundia MediTech and Xcovery announce new drug discovery

Feb 10 2009

Sundia MediTech, a CRO company based in Shanghai, China and Xcovery, a company based in Florida, U.S.A. jointly announced their 2 year collaborative success in new drug discovery at IBC's BioProcess International Conference yesterday in San Diego, USA.

So far their collaboration has achieved 4 pre-clinic candidates, with 2 more candidates to be identified within the next 3 months. Dr. Xiaochuan Wang, CEO of Sundia MediTech Company and Ms. Teri A. Swift, Vice President for Business Development of Xcovery, made the announcement together.

Both of Xcovery's founders are legendary figures in the U.S. biotech industry. Mr. Sherry Snyder, CEO of the company, is a pioneer and leader of this industry with significant contributions towards its development. In his professional career, he founded different companies including the well-known biotech company Genzyme. Company CSO Dr. Chris Liang earned his reputation as a leading drug discovery expert from his leadership and contribution to the discovery of Sutent, Pfizer's leading anti-cancer drug. In recent years, he continued to achieve multiple successes in drug discovery.

In 2006, Mr. Snyder invited Dr. Liang to start a new drug discovery company Xcovery. They abandoned the old model of using internal resources to do research and utilized almost 100% CRO resources for R&D work instead. After evaluating many CRO companies, amongst more than 10 in China they selected Sundia as their CRO service provider. "We are honored to have the opportunity of providing R&D service to Xcovery," said Sundia's CEO Dr. Xiaochuan Wang. "It is Sundia's objective to provide high end CRO service with rich R&D content to our clients. We have successfully identified 12 new pre-clinic candidates for our client companies from different countries."

According to Dr. Chris Liang, the result of Xcovery's collaboration with Sundia was much better than they expected. They got 4 (possibly 6) pre-clinic products in merely 2.5 years. Compared to their initial target, the research efficiency and outcome is ten folds higher. Mr. Snyder commented: "The value of this collaboration is not only in the pre-clinic candidates we've generated, but more importantly it sets a precedent as the most efficient and economical model for new drug discovery."