BioFocus, an integrated drug discovery service partner, and InterMed Discovery GmbH (IMD), a natural product lead-discovery company, announced a marketing collaboration to offer enhanced natural product discovery to the pharmaceutical, animal health, and agrochemical industries. No financial details were disclosed.

Under the terms of the collaboration, IMD will make its natural product screening libraries available and provide follow-on services to BioFocus. BioFocus will then incorporate these as part of its own integrated drug discovery offerings. BioFocus has a track record of service deals with industry for the discovery of active ingredients in pharmaceutical, animal health and agrochemical applications.

“We believe that the combination of our natural product capabilities with the well known discovery capabilities of BioFocus will offer a powerful discovery solution at a time when there is already growing demand from the pharma, veterinary and agro industries to fill depleted pipelines,” said Dr Thomas Henkel, co-managing director of InterMed Discovery.

“We have been impressed with the scale of IMDs natural product discovery capabilities and we believe that when InterMed’s natural product libraries and services are combined with our screening services, our engine for drug discovery will be substantially enhanced and more cost-effective for our clients,” added Dr Chris Newton, managing director BioFocus.

Originally developed within Bayer Healthcare AG, the IMD natural product integrated discovery platform consists of the largest natural compound libraries available to industry and a powerful combination of rich databases of data and research relating to natural compounds. Together with BioFocus’ screening technologies and integrated discovery capabilities they amount to a strong platform in the discovery of biologically functional natural compounds.

BioFocus delivers drug discovery solutions through a comprehensive platform run by dedicated teams with a track record in gene-to-clinical candidate discovery.

InterMed Discovery is a world class natural product lead-discovery company, driving innovation through the generation of novel product candidates for the life science, food and cosmetics industries.