Bayer HealthCare joins Structural Genomics Consortium

Bayer HealthCare has joined the not-for-profit Structural Genomics Consortium, a public-private partnership with active research facilities at the Universities of Oxford and Toronto.

The company will provide funding support for the consortium to help accelerate precompetitive drug research in the areas of protein sciences and epigenetics. These research efforts will open up new possibilities for the development of novel therapies, particularly in oncology.

In addition to the financial backing, Bayer will provide a subset of its compound library for screening and will also conduct research work to identify chemical structures that support preclinical target validation.

Chemical probes and protein X-ray structures discovered through the collaboration will be made available via the public domain without any restriction on use.

Professor Hanno Wild, senior vice-president and head of candidate generation and exploration at Bayer HealthCare Global Drug Discovery, said: "While advancing the field by discovering new probes, we hope to gain a better understanding of disease processes and find new starting points for drug discovery programmes."

This comes after the company announced a new collaboration last month with Inception Sciences and Versant Ventures in the field of ophthalmology.