Inpharmatica Ltd. announced today that Schering AG, Germany (FSE:SCH; NYSE:SHR) has commissioned Inpharmatica to develop a target-family specific knowledge-base. The chemogenomics knowledge base, Inpharmatica’s Kinase SARfari™, covers the biology and chemistry of the major group of highly successful targets in drug discovery. Kinase SARfari will be used by Schering as part of its drug discovery process in the field of protein kinases.

As well as being easy to use for medicinal and computational chemists, structural biologists, bioinformaticians and pharmacologists, Kinase SAR fari has two other key advantages. It combines both public domain and proprietary data, for every member of the human protein kinase gene family, and, critically, allows Schering to load its own proprietary data into the knowledge base.

Under the terms of the agreement, Schering will receive a multi-year, multi-user license. Financial terms were not disclosed.

“It is great to see our chemocentric approaches to data storage, analysis and design applied to drug design adopted by more and more leading pharmaceutical companies,” said John Lisle, CEO Inpharmatica Ltd.. “We are pleased that we have strengthened our commercial relationship with Schering AG following on collaborations in druggability assessment and licensing of our Biopendium annotation database.

”Kinase SARfari is built from core components of Inpharmatica’s integrated gene-to-candidate technology platform which totally integrates biology- and chemistry-based drug discovery activities. This platform optimises target selection based on druggability and selectivity, and enables rapid identification of hits and selection of high quality leads and pre-clinical candidates,. The technology platform has been developed by Inpharmatica from solutions to real customer challenges in the drug discovery and related fields.

Inpharmatica is designing Kinase SARfari to provide researchers with a single essential data resource including protein sequences and 3D-structural data, and is engineered to be able to store and analyse up to 500,000 kinase inhibitors. The core screening data in Kinase SARfari is derived from StARLITe™, Inpharmatica’s proprietary medicinal chemistry and pharmacology database. The application is a web-accessible resource structured for ease of use and fully searchable by compound structure, protein sequence, and text