HitGen Announces Collaboration with the University of Manchester Release Time：2013-11-10

Chengdu, November 8th, 2013 – HitGen Ltd today announced that it has entered into a research collaboration with The University of Manchester’s Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute Drug Discovery Group and Cancer Research Technology using HitGen’s proprietary lead discovery technology. Within the framework of the collaboration, hundreds of millions of small molecules will be screened to discover and advance drug candidates against multiple new oncology targets of interest to the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute. 

HitGen’s encoded libraries have been designed to contain many hundreds of millions of small molecules with drug-like properties and have been synthesized on many chemically diverse scaffolds in order to provide maximum opportunity for finding drug leads against protein targets from known and novel protein classes. 

Under the terms of the agreement the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute will provide HitGen with funding for llaborative research and success-based milestone payments as candidate molecules progress through preclinical testing and into clinical development. Further financial details were not disclosed. 

“We are very pleased to initiate our research partnerships by entering into this drug discovery collaboration with the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, a world leading cancer research group.” said Dr Jin Li, CEO of HitGen Ltd. “We are looking forward to successfully tackling challenging targets using this cutting edge technology in collaboration with the innovative scientists at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute.” 

“We are very excited by this collaboration; HitGen’s technology offers us a novel way of prosecuting cancer targets derived from Cancer Research UK funded research” said Dr Donald Ogilvie, Head of the Drug Discovery Unit at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute. “We anticipate that this will allow us to tackle targets which have not been amenable to more traditional hit finding methods”. He went on to say that “in the longer term we hope that this collaboration will allow us to deliver real patient benefit to the global cancer community.” 

“This important collaboration will allow us to access a library of millions of compounds enabling us to develop new ways to block challenging targets. This agreement will pave the way for new treatments and new options for patients which we hope ultimately will one day save more lives from cancer” said Dr Phil L’Huillier, Director of Business Development at CRT. 

    For further details about HitGen please contact: 

    HitGen Ltd 

    Dr Jin Li, Chairman and CEO 

    Phone: +86 2885 197385 

   info@hitgen.com