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Dr. Jordi Mestres, Chemotargets' Founder & CEO (Photo: Barcelona Science Park, Daniel Portales).
 12.06.2017

Prous Institute for Biomedical Research invests in Chemotargets

Prous Institute for Biomedical Research has signed a investment agreement with Chemotargets, an IMIM's spin-off  located at the Barcelona Science Park. Chemotargets’ goal is to offer a novel integrated knowledge-based platform to fast-forward the process of bringing new medicines to market, speeding up drug discovery and development programs, and making them more cost-efficient.

 

The investment will allow Chemotargets to expand its product development and accelerate its innovation plans in the drug discovery & development spaces. In addition, it will permit Chemotargets to grow its customer base and achieve a global presence in the pharmaceutical, healthcare and related industries.

As part of the agreement, Prous Institute will also leverage Chemotargets’ informatics solutions for its own drug discovery programs in the fields of cancer and neurodegeneration.

An immediate milestone of this agreement will be the introduction of a new big data analytics and visualization platform integrating chemistry, genomics, pharmacology, toxicology and therapeutics.

Big data is having an enormous impact in the finding of better and safer drugs. The use of advanced predictive analytics and visualization technologies enables the generation of new working hypotheses by seamlessly navigating within the enormous amount of data coming from modern biomedical research. Chemotargets’ platform optimizes research and development efforts by facilitating the existence of links between small molecules, their primary targets and secondary off-targets, the associated safety issues and the likely use in particular therapeutic areas.

Likewise, in the context of this transaction, the advanced computational approaches developed by Chemotargets will be evolved towards adapting the new platform to the new Precision Medicine paradigm.

“Chemotargets offers a state-of-the-art platform in its field and has a unique vision to develop it into a global solution for emerging applications in the life sciences, from initial drug discovery to clinical point of care” said Dr. Josep Prous, VP of Research & Development, Prous Institute. “We look forward to working closely with Dr Mestres’ team to maximize synergies and add value for customers.”

Dr. Jordi Mestres, Chemotargets’ Founder & CEO commented: “We are very excited about this new partnership with Prous Institute which will allow us to accelerate our product development and innovation plans in the drug discovery space and continue to bring product upgrades and new enhancements to our growing number of end-users. Prous has over 50 years experience creating and managing biomedical knowledge and its reputation for the quality of its data and products is recognized worldwide. In this respect we highly value the agreement for what Prous will bring to Chemotargets beyond growth equity”.

Dr Joaquim Bellmunt, Director of IMIM, said: “Dr. Mestres is a Principal Investigator of IMIM and a pioneer in technology transfer within our Institution. We are delighted to see how our spin-off will be able to move to its next growth phase thanks to this strategic investment from Prous”.