Domainex Ltd, the leading UK-based drug discovery CRO, has won the 2010 Genesis Life Science Innovation and Enterprise Programme Of The Year Award. This Award was made in recognition of Domainex's proactive work on promoting academic-industry collaborations, and was adjudicated by leading representatives of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.

The competition was organized by One Nucleus, the membership organisation for international life science and healthcare companies, in order to recognise UK biotech successes. Domainex is indeed a highly successful biotech company, with one of the best drug discovery track records in the industry. Its medicinal chemistry expertise has delivered 3 novel drugs into clinical trials on behalf of its clients during the last 4 years.

Domainex currently supports a number of drug discovery consortia: for example, working with Professor Alan Ashworth's group at Breakthrough Breast Cancer at the Institute of Cancer Research to develop a novel breast cancer drug and with Professor Clive Robinson's group at St George's University of London to invent a new treatment for asthma. In both cases, Domainex helped the groups to secure Wellcome Trust SDDI funding, and has subsequently provided medicinal and computational chemistry to facilitate their drug discovery, with the aim of nominating candidate drugs by the end of the program.

Eddy Littler, CEO of Domainex said "Domainex offers high-quality and efficient drug discovery services to the global biotechnology and pharma marketplaces. We have also supported a number of drug discovery funding applications to organisations such as The Wellcome Trust, The MRC, DTRA and the Technology Strategy Board, and we will continue to do so. We are currently investigating a number of potential future collaborations with leading academic groups wishing to enter translational research. Organisations interested in translational research with validated targets in diseases of medical need should contact us to discuss the opportunities ."

Keith Powell Chairman of Domainex added "Domainex goes from strength to strength, building on both chemistry and the unique CDH platform to offer customers and potential licensees the benefits of a world-class collaborator. Eddy, Trevor and the team at Domainex should be congratulated on another successful year and a strong platform for the future."

About Domainex
• Domainex uses unique and proprietary technologies to resolve common bottlenecks facing the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries in the post-genomic era. Major discovery 'gaps' exist between the vast amount of genomic information that is now available, the accessibility of the corresponding proteins for use in target validation and drug discovery, and the identification of robust hits in a cost effective manner. Founded in 2002, Domainex is a privately owned company with laboratories in Cambridge, England, and offices in the London Bioscience Innovation Centre.

• Domainex has developed a number of platform technologies specifically aimed at enabling biotech or pharma companies who have exciting new drug targets. Its Combinatorial Domain Hunting (CDH) technology will deliver protein constructs that are soluble, stable, and produced in high-yield - thereby opening up the path to high throughput screening, structural biology, or antibody production.
• Domainex has also developed LeadBuilder - a virtual screening approach for targets which is specifically aimed at identifying hit molecules that are ideally suited for further development.
• The experienced medicinal chemistry team has a proven track record in supporting biotech or university groups by providing expertise to take hit compounds through lead optimisation and on to candidate selection. Several compounds arising from these collaborations are currently in clinical evaluation.
• Domainex works with clients on a fee-for-service basis. In 2010, the company secured investment to advance its own internal drug discovery pipeline based upon a number of targets in oncology. These targets are being progressed using Domainex's platform technologies.