GVK Biosciences has entered into an agreement with Dr Kimito Funatsu, University of Tokyo on its G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) Databases. Dr Kimito Funatsu, a world-renowned professor, teaches at University of Tokyo's prestigious Department of Chemical System Engineering.

The agreement covers the GPCR class of targets curated at GVK BIO. Professor Kimito Funatsu will utilize the manually curated GPCR inhibitor database that contains over 1 million published and patented inhibitors and over 4 million quantitative structure-activity points, to develop advanced cheminformatics tools. Chemical Biological and Pharmacological Information of GPCR inhibitors from International Journals, US and International Patents have been curated to form this database which is available in various formats like in ISIS/Base DB, SD, XML and Oracle.

Professor Kimito Funatsu heads the Funatsu Laboratory at University of Tokyo. He is also the chairman of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences in The Chemical Society of Japan. The principal research theme of the Funatsu laboratory is Chemoinfomatics, which is the novel research area for solving various chemical problems by using technologies of information sciences.

GVK BIO is a leader in SAR, PK/Tox, Clinpharm and Biomarker databases manually curated from various journals, patents, clinical trials and literature. Apart from GPCR, GVK BIO has MedChem database and nine other target inhibitor databases namely, Kinase, Protease, Ion-channel, NHR, Transporter, Phosphotase, Transferase, Lipase and Phosphodiesterases. MedChem Database has information from Medicinal Chemistry journals.

"We are honored to initiate this collaboration with Professor Kimito Funatsu. The efforts of the collaboration would result in the development of advanced cheminformatics tools that would utilize the vast amount of published and patented knowledge to further accelerate drug discovery," stated Sreeni Devidas, vice president Business Development, GVK BIO.