Biosearch Italia and Myriad Genetics Inc have formed a collaboration to discover novel therapeutic compounds. Biosearch Italia will provide Myriad with access to its natural product library. Using its proprietary proteomic and biopharmaceutical technologies, Myriad will select promising drug targets, develop high-throughput screening assays and screen Biosearch Italia's library with these assays. Development rights to any resulting compounds will be shared between the two companies.

Biosearch Italia has one of the largest and most diversified libraries of micro-organisms and microbial extracts in the world. Naturally-occurring micro-organisms are isolated through proprietary methods to create a microbial collection and cultivated to obtain a wide range of different molecules. These are then extracted and carefully stored in an extract library. The Company's microbial collection contains around 50,000 molecules and the extract library has around 100,000 samples. Both are under continual expansion.

Myriad's drug development approach is based on the identification of novel drug targets and the discovery of the disease pathway in which they function. Using ProNet, its advanced proprietary proteomics technology, Myriad identifies and validates a large number of potential drug targets. These targets are then screened using a proprietary drug screening technology, ProTrap, to identify new lead compounds which are then developed internally or licensed to pharmaceutical companies.

The collaboration will complement, in therapeutic fields other than antibacterials and antifungals, the extensive drug discovery research conducted directly by Biosearch, making use of its mechanism-based assays. Biosearch's discovery efforts have already generated a number of potentially useful product candidates including ramoplanin (in Phase III trials for the prevention of vancomycin-resistant enterococcal infections), dalbavancin (in Phase II trials for the treatment of multi-drug resistant Gram-positive infections) and BI-K0376 (about to enter clinical development for the topical treatment of acne).