Aquapharm Biodiscovery signs research agreement with AMRI

Aquapharm Biodiscovery, a leading marine biotechnology company, announced today it has signed a research agreement with Albany Molecular Research (NASDAQ: AMRI) to identify novel drug-like compounds and scaffolds with anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory activity from Aquapharm's marine natural products library derived from its extensive collection of marine micro-organisms.

“We have a wealth of experience accumulated from developing and mining our own extensive terrestrial natural product library, and we are pleased to apply this experience to Aquapharm's marine derived library. It's a new and exciting opportunity”

Under the terms of this agreement, drawing on its substantial experience and expertise from previous screening campaigns with its terrestrial natural products library, AMRI will screen Aquapharm's library against Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria and an undisclosed anti-inflammatory target and will isolate and elucidate the structures of novel hits. Aquapharm retains all rights to compounds resulting from the collaboration.

The collaboration represents a major step-forward for Aquapharm in realising the potential of its unique marine assets and expertise in the Pharmaceutical sector. This builds on its established deals with Croda to develop novel bio-active ingredients for the Personal Care industry and Dr Reddy's to develop bio-catalysts, thus maximising the exploitation of the marine collection in producing a broad and diverse chemical library.

On signing of the agreement, Aquapharm CEO Simon Best said "We are confident that this collaboration will exploit the novelty, diversity and drug-like characteristics of the compounds which we know from pilot studies are abundantly produced by marine micro-organisms. These represent a virtually untapped source of compounds and scaffolds with many attractive characteristics to form the basis of numerous drug-discovery partnerships."

"We have a wealth of experience accumulated from developing and mining our own extensive terrestrial natural product library, and we are pleased to apply this experience to Aquapharm's marine derived library. It's a new and exciting opportunity" said AMRI Vice President, Discovery Research and Development Bruce Sargent, Ph.D.

Initial results from this research agreement are expected during 2011. AMRI has broad screening capabilities and moreover particular expertise in seeking antibacterial natural products, having successfully completed its own internal screen of its collections yielding multiple lead compounds effective against MRSA and E.Coli organisms.