Drug discovery company Domainex and biopharmaceutical firm UCB have successfully completed their first collaborative project with the creation of a particularly elusive target protein construct
Domainex used its combinatorial domain hunting technology to identify a soluble and highly-expressed construct of a protein that had been refractory to other methods.
This construct was then used by UCB to obtain a high-resolution crystal structure of the target protein with a proprietary inhibitor bound to the active site.
Mark Bushfield of UCB commented: "The construct provided by Domainex has all the characteristics that we were looking for, and I am sure this would not have been found using any other method.
"We are currently in discussions to agree the next stage of our collaboration".
Eddy Littler, CEO of Domainex, added: "Our technology is unique, proprietary and offers an opportunity to work on targets hitherto unavailable to the pharmaceutical industry.
"We are delighted that our collaboration with UCB has already come to fruition and we look forward to working together on future projects".