PharmQuest and UC San Francisco receive grants from University of California's DiMI and IUCRP Programs to initiate $1.4M dru

The two companies announced that the collaboration will fund ongoing work at PharmQuest and UCSF.

By Editor on Apr 24, 2001

The two companies announced that the collaboration will fund ongoing work at PharmQuest and UCSF. Intellectual property resulting from the collaboration will be jointly owned by PharmQuest and UCSF and available for licensing through PharmQuest.

The funding, in part, was awarded from the State of California's Industry University Cooperative Research Program (IUCRP), with a matching grant from the University of California's Digital Media Innovation Program (DiMI), The award will be spread over four years and will fund nearly half the proposed collaborative research costs.

According to the partnering companies the PharmQuest/UCSF research program will focus on creating digital knowledge tools to expedite the drug development process, to discriminate sooner between likely "winners and losers", and thereby more quickly bring safer, better drugs to market. The research program will involve integrating information and knowledge needed for the development of drugs with knowledge used in the discovery of new drug molecules.

"The University of California's matching grants program (uc-industry.berkeley.edu) has presented us with a unique opportunity to jointly leverage PharmQuest's unique capabilities and vision with UC's world class innovative research capabilities", said Anthony Hunt, Principal Investigator of the research work at UCSF. "The goals of this new collaborative research program are beyond what either our research group or PharmQuest could accomplish on our own. This is a beautiful example of industry-university cooperative research that is uniquely interdisciplinary. We are drawing on new knowledge and capabilities in computer science, pharmaceutical science, engineering, statistics, physical chemistry,
pharmacology and toxicology to develop a new in silico framework for
pharmaceutical decision-makers that links the drug discovery and development
processes."

"UCSF is one of the leading biomedical research universities in the country and has some of the more advanced research programs in drug discovery and development," Seema Handu, Vice President of Research & Development at PharmQuest. "PharmQuest is extremely pleased to be working with the Hunt Lab at UCSF to leverage their expertise and extensive knowledge to commercialize new digital solutions."