TOKYO, Japan I May 1, 2015 I PeptiDream Inc., a public Tokyo-based biopharmaceutical company (“PeptiDream”)(TOKYO:4587) today announced a multi-target discovery and optimization collaboration with Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, N.J., U.S.A., known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, through a subsidiary. Under the agreement, PeptiDream will use its proprietary Peptide Discovery Platform System (PDPS) technology to generate macrocylic/constrained peptides against multiple targets of interest selected by Merck & Co. Inc. Merck & Co. Inc. will have the right to develop and commercialize all therapeutic peptides resulting from the collaboration and retains an option to nonexclusively license the PDPS technology at a future date. PeptiDream will receive an undisclosed upfront payment, research funding and will be eligible for payments associated with the achievement of certain preclinical and clinical development milestones. In addition, PeptiDream is eligible to receive royalties on sales of any products that arise from the collaboration.

“We are very excited to collaborate with Merck & Co. Inc. PeptiDream has emerged as a major player in the constrained peptide space,” said Kiichi Kubota, CEO of PeptiDream Inc. “Our unique PDPS platform allows us to rapidly build highly diverse constrained peptide libraries, largely tailored to the individual target, leading to the rapid identification of chemically diverse hits, which can then be quickly assessed for the desired biological activity profiles. No other technology can create such a chemically and structurally diverse set of functional and developable leads in such a short period of time”.

In the past five years, PeptiDream has established funded discovery collaborations with many leading pharmaceutical companies, such as Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Mitsubishi Tanabe, Daiichi Sankyo, as well as a strategic collaboration with Ipsen, all of which are active and ongoing. In addition, PeptiDream has transferred its PDPS discovery platform for broad use to Bristol-Myers-Squibb and Novartis.

SOURCE: Peptidream