Nuevolution A/S announced that Merck & Co Inc has chosen to proceed to the second phase of the collaboration agreement announced in June 2008 to apply Nuevolution's proprietary Chemetics drug discovery technology to identify novel small molecule leads against several drug targets.

By entering the second phase, Merck gains access to a new multi-million member proprietary library of small molecule drug candidates. In addition, this development triggers the payment of an undisclosed technology access fee to Nuevolution from Merck.

"We are pleased with Merck's decision to proceed with the collaboration into its second phase," said Alex Gouliaev, CEO of Nuevolution A/S. "We look forward to decoding the active structures arising from this proprietary library."

Nuevolution is a leading drug discovery company founded in 2001 and based in Copenhagen, Denmark. The company has developed Chemetics, a unique, patent protected hybrid of proven wet chemistry and molecular biology which represents the ultimate fragment based drug discovery technology. Chemetics enables rapid synthesis and DNA-tagging of hundreds of millions of chemically diverse drug-like small molecule compounds and the efficient screening of these, facilitating the identification of potent drug leads at unprecedented quantity, quality and speed compared to existing drug discovery technologies.

Nuevolution partners its technology with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and is also developing an internal pipeline by applying Chemetics to validated cancer and cardiovascular targets.