Bristol-Myers Squibb and Ensemble Therapeutics extend alliance

Bristol-Myers Squibb has agreed to expand its partnership with Ensemble Therapeutics, based on the success of the collaboration so far.

Under the terms of the extension, Ensemble will continue to pursue all eight of the drug discovery targets outlined in the original April 2009 agreement between the companies.

Bristol-Myers Squibb is deploying Ensemble's proprietary drug discovery platforms and Ensemblin compound libraries to discover and advance this research, which focuses on conditions for which no small molecule therapies have been developed successfully.

This outcome will see Ensemble receive additional research funding from Bristol-Myers Squibb and follows last year's news that the development of a candidate treatment for one of the targets had been achieved.

Dr Michael Taylor, chief executive officer of Ensemble Therapeutics, said: "Ensemble has made progress to address a set of notoriously difficult protein/protein interaction targets with our novel Ensemblins and related chemistry platforms."

This comes after Bristol-Myers Squibb was named the best big drug company of the year by Forbes magazine earlier this week.