Locus Pharmaceuticals, a privately held drug discovery and development biotechnology company in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, has entered into a discovery research collaboration with Novartis. Locus will collaborate with Novartis to discover novel chemotypes on targets of interest to Novartis` select therapeutic areas.

"We are very excited about the opportunity to work with such a prominent pharmaceutical company to enhance their drug discovery efforts using the Locus technology," said Dr Joan Lau, president of Locus Pharmaceuticals. "The strength of the Locus discovery process lies not just with the technology, but also the integrated drug design team approach, uniquely customized for each project," she added.

Locus has developed and successfully applied a novel virtual fragment-based drug design (FBDD) platform into an integrated system for drug discovery. Driven by computational protein modelling and FBDD technology, Locus` technology supports rapid discovery of novel target-selective drug molecules. The technology platform is broadly applicable to many target classes including, but not limited to kinases, proteases, and receptors. Drug design teams comprised of experienced computational and medicinal chemists are trained to utilize the suite of Locus computational tools.