HitGen Announces Collaboration in Drug Discovery with Cyclofluidic Ltd Release Time：2015-04-17

Partnership will use Cyclofluidic’s automated chemistry platform CyclOpsTM to optimise hits obtained through affinity screening of HitGen’s DNA Encoded Library to enable Drug Candidate Identification.

Chengdu, China, 17 April 2015– HitGen Ltd today announced that it has entered into research collaboration with Cyclofluidic Ltd, UK, using hits obtained from HitGen’s proprietary lead discovery technology. Within the framework of the collaboration, novel allosteric inhibitors of GSK3b, a kinase implicated in neurodegenerative diseases, will be optimised using CyclOpsTM technology to provide advanced leads suitable for clinical development.

HitGen’s encoded libraries have been designed to contain over one billion small molecules with drug-like properties and have been synthesized on many chemically diverse scaffolds in order to provide maximum opportunity for finding such novel hits against protein targets from known and novel protein classes.

Cyclofluidic’s CyclOps™ platform connects flow chemistry, purification, screening and drug design with complex algorithms allowing drug lead molecules to be assayed minutes, rather than weeks, after they are designed.

Under the terms of the agreement Cyclofluidic Ltd and HitGen Ltd will collaborate to generate advanced drug leads with highly selective inhibitory properties with a view to licensing these compounds for clinical development of treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Alzheimer’s Disease. Further financial details were not disclosed.

“We are very pleased to initiate another research partnership by entering into this drug discovery collaboration with Cyclofluidic Ltd, a world leading microfluidic research group.” said Dr Jin Li, CEO of HitGen Ltd. “We are looking forward to working with the research teams at Cyclofluidic in developing advanced leads of significant clinical value by applying this cutting edge technology from Cyclofluidic Ltd to our novel hit compounds.”

“We are very excited by this collaboration; our platform technology in accelerated hit optimisation meshes extremely well with HitGen’s hit finding approach providing an opportunity to rapidly add value.” said Dr David Parry, COO of Cyclofluidic Ltd. “We are delighted to be working with the HitGen team in this exciting new collaboration.”

For further details about HitGen please contact:

HitGen Ltd 

Dr Jin Li, Chairman and CEO

Phone: +86 2885 197385

info@hitgen.com

For further details about Cyclofluidic Ltd please contact:

Cyclofluidic Ltd

Dr Dave Parry, COO

+44 (0)1707 358676

info@cyclofluidic.co.uk

About HitGen

HitGen is a privately owned small molecule lead discovery company founded in 2012. It is founded with significant start up funding from private investors and the High Tech Zone in Chengdu, China. The company has developed a proprietary lead generation platform based on the design, rapid chemical synthesis and screening of large numbers (over 1 billion) of diverse DNA-encoded chemical libraries of drug-like small molecules and macrocycles. HitGen’s encoded libraries have been used to identify novel, potent and selective leads for protein-protein interaction targets (PPIs), kinases, proteases, recombinant GPCRs, epigenetic targets, etc. HitGen partners its technology and discovery programmes with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as well as other drug discovery research organisations to discover and develop innovative medicines for unmet medical needs.

For more information about HitGen Ltd, please visit the company’s website www.HitGen.com .

About Cyclofluidic Ltd

Cyclofluidic is using CyclOps™, its proprietary microfluidic drug discovery platform, to revolutionise hit and lead optimisation.

The Cyclofluidic CyclOps™ platform is an innovative technology platform which directly integrates molecule synthesis with biochemical screening. The platform uses an integrated machine learning algorithm to select molecules meeting the required criteria and to also allow 24/7 unattended operation. The team have shown that use of the platform reduces timelines for hit to lead optimisation by 50%, from a year to less than 6 months, allowing molecules to progress into pre-clinical studies faster.

For more information about Cyclofluidic Ltd, please visit the company’s website www.cyclofluidic.co.uk