Cengent Therapeutics, a new drug discovery company, formed by the completion of the merger of Structural Bioinformatics and GeneFormatics, was announced today. The California Department of Corporations and the shareholders of both companies have approved the merger.

Cengent Therapeutics is a structure-guided drug discovery company utilizing integrated, proprietary computational and experimental lab technologies to accelerate and optimize the drug discovery process.

"There are several driving forces behind this merger and the creation of Cengent Therapeutics, namely an extended offering of products and services, enhanced drug discovery capabilities, and additional capital resources," stated Dr. Edward Maggio, CEO of Cengent Therapeutics.

David D. Muth, President and COO, added, "These are exciting times. Cengent Therapeutics will serve the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries with our leading services for accelerating and optimizing the drug discovery process. Additionally, we will pursue corporate collaborations to advance our pipeline."

Cengent Therapeutics provides the most comprehensive suite of structural services and capabilities for accelerating and optimizing the drug discovery process. The company's technologies include Genes To Leads to accelerate and validate lead discovery; Structure Determination Services including augmented homology modeling, X-ray crystallography, and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy; StructureBank, a database for the comparative analysis of protein targets and anti-targets; Proteome Analysis, a suite of technologies providing target identification and function information; and DBA for data-mining and pattern recognition.

The company has established corporate partnerships with Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Boehringer Ingelheim, Yamanouchi, Incyte, Analex (Advanced Biosystems), De Novo Pharmaceuticals, ArQule, AtheroGenics, Shire Pharmaceuticals, and Texas Biotechnology, that has advanced Sitaxsentan, a drug lead identified with Cengent's Genes To Leads technology to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), into Phase III clinical trials.