Graffinity Pharmaceuticals GmbH Enters into Drug Discovery Collaboration with Shionogi & Co., Ltd.

Heidelberg, Germany, March 30, 2011 / b3c newswire / - Graffinity Pharmaceuticals GmbH , a member of the NovAliX group of companies, announced today that it has entered into a research collaboration with Osaka, Japan based Shionogi & Co., Ltd. Under the terms of the agreement, Graffinity will receive technology access fees and payments for follow-up chemistry for the generation of various, novel small molecule hits against a key drug target.

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Mathias Woker, Chief Business Officer of Graffinity, remarked, ”We are pleased that Shionogi has chosen to collaborate with us to apply our fragment based screening platform to one of Shionogi’s high priority discovery programs. This marks our first collaboration with a leading Japanese pharmaceutical company. Our proprietary assay/label-free SPR primary screen of 24,000 fragments and 87,000 leadlike molecules is often crucial in addressing drug targets that are difficult to screen with other technologies.”

About Graffinity Pharmaceuticals GmbH - www.graffinity.com

Heidelberg, Germany based Graffinity Pharmaceuticals, a member of the NovAliX group of companies, is a leader in the field of small molecule fragment-based drug discovery. Graffinity’s fragment screening platform combines chemical microarrays with a proprietary method for the standardized, label-free detection of compound-protein interactions via SPR-imaging. The company’s rapid and scalable drug discovery technology explores a rich chemical universe to identify drug fragments which address challenging drug targets. With its 110,000-compound library that contains 24,000 true fragments, Graffinity possesses one of the most diverse fragment libraries. Graffinity’s unique fragment based discovery platform was invented in 1998, and has been in routine industrial use since 2002 in screening more than 90 drug targets.

Media Contact Graffinity for Europe

Dr. Kristina Schmidt CEO Graffinity Pharmaceuticals GmbH Tel. +49 6221 6510-112 kristina.schmidt@graffinity.com

Graffinity Media Contact for the Americas and Asia

Mathias Woker CBO Graffinity Pharmaceuticals GmbH Tel. +1 (401) 301-1086 mathias.woker@graffinity.com

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