Jubilant Biosys, the subsidiary of Jubilant Organosys is in the process of expanding its preclinical capabilities. The company is in the process of expanding its animal facilities, which includes a nude mice facility for research efforts across oncology, metabolic diseases and CNS therapeutic areas.

No details of the investment were made available. The animal facility is located in Bangalore close to its full-fledged research centre in the Yeshwantpur Industrial Area. “In addition to expanding the testing capabilities, the expanded facility will also enable captive breeding for rats, mice, guinea pigs and rabbits, besides a large animal facility for dogs. These initiatives will help Jubilant expand its pre-clinical services,” Sri Mosur, CEO & president, Global Drug Discovery and Development, Jubilant Biosys told Pharmabiz.

“One of the key objectives of the nude mice facility is to have an understanding of cancer and which will help us to offer pre-clinical services to pharma-biotech companies and strengthen our expertise in the oncology segment”, said Mosur.

The nude mice facility will help the company to quickly validate research findings and take it to proof of concept stage. “In oncology, we have developed multiple disease models to better understand the disease,” he added.

The company also has a platform in place to study multiple pain models as well as diabetes and obesity models in the area of CNS and metabolic diseases.

These efforts will help the company to offer a comprehensive range of services and have a head start in the drug discovery segment. The company has also conceived a ‘business of science model’ built on its chemistry-biology capability. This has helped Jubilant to foray into early stage discovery, lead optimization, target identification and validation which allows commercialization of the possible drug candidate, said Mosur.

Moving its business of drug discovery through a partnership mode, Jubilant adopted a ‘shared risk’ model based on a technology platform where it focuses on computational chemistry, medicinal chemistry, structural biology as well as high throughput screening as lead generation platforms to enable drug discovery for the pharmaceutical industry.

Early this month its parent company Jubilant Organosys and Eli Lilly extended the drug discovery collaboration agreement for another five years as their four-year-old research collaboration had successfully delivered multiple discovery milestones and pre-clinical candidates. In November, it had also inked a joint venture with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), and Southern Research Institute. It will undertake developing new drugs through work performed at UAB and Southern Research, and Jubilant in India. The joint venture will help to license drugs to the pharmaceutical industry with revenues distributed to investment participants in milestone payments and royalty streams, according to the company.