Hamburg, Germany - Basel, Switzerland, 2005/09/13

Evotec Technologies GmbH, a world-wide supplier of innovative tools and technologies for life science and pharmaceutical drug discovery, and Genedata AG, a global provider of in silico drug discovery solutions, announced today that they entered into an agreement to combine their strengths in the area of High Content and High Throughput Screening.

Evotec Technologies and Genedata expect synergistic effects in combining Evotec Technologies’ instrumentation (EVOscreen® and plate::explorer™) and analysis software (Acapella™) with Genedata's software system Genedata Screener®. The combination of both company’s products provides more detailed information about potential lead structures, facilitating decision making within the drug discovery process and reducing the risk of costly late stage failures. Evotec Technologies and Genedata therefore decided to jointly promote the combined product offering as a one-stop solution.

Martin Daffertshofer, Vice President at Evotec Technologies GmbH, stated: “Over the past years, Evotec Technologies has successfully developed and commercialised high-end detection technologies for the analysis of biological systems. The resulting information is analyzed by our proprietary Acapella™ software, which is already able to extract a multitude of relevant biological and pharmacological parameters. We are very enthusiastic that the combination of Evotec Technologies’ screening solutions and Genedata's drug discovery software extends this capability to fully integrated secondary data analysis, that allows the exploitation of this wealth of information for an early prediction of reliable pharmacological lead structures in drug discovery.”

Stephan Heyse, project leader Screener at Genedata AG added: “The routine usage of high information assays adds important mechanistic information about compounds early in the drug discovery process. Genedata has been pioneering the interpretation of complex biological high-throughput data from new experimental technologies by delivering state of the art software systems to the scientists in drug discovery. We are happy to join forces now with Evotec Technologies to establish a complete solution for generation and interpretation of high-precision imaging and kinetic experiments early in the drug discovery process, serving to reduce costs and risks in the process.”
Both companies demonstrate the benefits of this collaborative approach at the 11th Annual Conference of the Society for Biomolecular Screening (SBS) in Geneva, Switzerland. Stephan Heyse speaks about “Taking Full Advantage of High-Content Screening Data for Automated Profiling of Drug Activity” on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005. In a presented case study a cell-based assay was screened on the EVOscreen® Mark III uHTS system, combined with the Opera™ high-content confocal imaging system. Analyzed with Genedata Screener® software, the multi-parametric image data was used to systematically discriminate process artifacts from reliable signals, to provide reliable, detailed activity information on complete libraries and to classify active compounds by mechanism of action at an early stage.


Notes to the editor:

The EVOscreen® system developed by Evotec Technologies is a fully integrated platform for high-throughput screening. The basic plate handling module combines integrated innovative liquid handling with a variety of superior high content read-out technologies. Thanks to its open software and hardware architecture, EVOscreen® can be employed in virtually all areas of biomolecular and cellular screening.

The plate::explorer™ uHTS system, originally developed by Carl Zeiss Jena, and now part of Evotec Technologies’ uHTS family, combines highly parallelised read-out with exceptionally robust automation technology. Each workstation of this modular screening device combines a number of liquid handling, micro plate storage/incubation and reading devices.

Acapella™ is a data analysis software which offers a broad spectrum of tools for the evaluation of scientific data. This product is the summary of a long-term experience and profound knowledge of biological, pharmaceutical and biotechnological data processing, even taking into account tomorrow’s demands.

Genedata Screener® is an integrated computational system tailor-made for the screening process in drug discovery and other related life sciences. Its powerful features for validating, structuring and interpreting screening data cater for the entire screening process; from validating primary screening data to exploring high potential leads. Tasks traditionally performed manually on a compound-by-compound basis are integrated in a highly intuitive and automated workflow.


Contacts

Evotec Technologies GmbH
Dr. Martin Daffertshofer
Schnackenburgallee 114
22525 Hamburg, Germany
Tel. +49 (0)40 560 81-2831
martin.daffertshofer@evotec-technologies.com
www.evotec-technologies.com

Genedata AG
Michael Brueckmann
Marketing Communications
Maulbeerstrasse 46
4016 Basel, Switzerland
Tel. +41 (0)61 697 7701
michael.brueckmann@genedata.com
www.genedata.com