Co-Marketing Agreement will Provide Faster Cheaper Metabolite Identification/Analysis

Agilent Technologies Inc have announced that it has entered into a co-marketing agreement with Molecular Discovery Ltd to provide biopharmaceutical researchers with an advanced metabolite-identification platform. The companies will co-market the combined assets of Agilent’s high-resolution liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) technology and Molecular Discovery’s Mass-MetaSite software to enable superior identification and analysis of complex biological mixtures.

“Until now, the challenges of identifying and predicting human drug metabolism have been major obstacles in the development of safe, effective drug candidates,” said Gus Salem, Vice President and General Manager of Agilent’s Biological Systems Division. “Together, Agilent Technologies and Molecular Discovery are working to solve this problem in pharmaceutical research. Whereas traditional metabolite identification, synthesis and toxicity testing has been costly and time consuming for researchers, our combined industry-leading technologies will now give them faster, more accurate data, and the confidence they need to ensure the safety of their products much earlier in the preclinical phase of development.

Gabriele Cruciani, Managing Director at Molecular Discovery, added, “Agilent’s leading LC/MS platform is enabling companies to obtain high-quality analytical data with a much higher throughput than before. This means that the experts now need to interpret even more data. Working together with Agilent, we are seamlessly combining these high-throughput hardware capabilities with Molecular Discovery’s high-throughput software capabilities, providing a revolutionary advanced metabolite identification platform.”

Prior to the approval of any new drug application, the US Food and Drug Administration requires that all therapeutic compounds be subjected to preclinical metabolic toxicity testing before human clinical trials can begin. As a primary part of this process, metabolites must be identified and critically assessed to understand how the drug compound will affect human metabolism. Traditionally, this task has been costly and time consuming for drug makers, and commonly deferred until the final stages of preclinical testing.