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Astex
Astex Pharmaceuticals is a biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of drugs in oncology and diseases of the central nervous system. Astex was founded in 1999 by Sir Tom Blundell, Chris Abell & Harren Jhoti, and is located in Cambridge, England. Astex is part of the Otsuka group of companies and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. History Astex was founded as “Astex Technology Limited” in 1999 in Cambridge, UK, to pioneer a novel approach to small molecule drug discovery known as ‘ fragment-based drug discovery’ (FBDD), a term first coined by Astex scientists (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12650591/) that is now a well recognized approach to small molecule drug discovery across the pharmaceutical industry. Astex's proprietary drug discovery platform, Pyramid, can effectively identify novel small molecule drugs for key disease targets. Originally funded by venture capital, from a number ...
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Harren Jhoti
Harren Jhoti (born 1962) is an Indian-born British structural biologist whose main interest has been rational drug design and discovery. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: He is president and chief executive officer (CEO) of biotechnology company Astex Pharmaceuticals ("Astex") which is located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Career Jhoti co-founded Astex with Tom Blundell and Chris Abell in 1999. He pioneered the development of fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD), an approach now widely used in industry and academia, which identifies small molecules with potential therapeutic potential as part of the drug discovery process. Jhoti was Astex's chief scientific officer until November 2007 when he was appointed CEO. In 2013, Astex was acquired for around USD $900 million and now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Prior to Astex, Jhoti was head of stru ...
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Tom Blundell
Sir Thomas Leon Blundell, (born 7 July 1942) is a British biochemist, structural biologist, and science administrator. He was a member of the team of Dorothy Hodgkin that solved in 1969 the first structure of a protein hormone, insulin. Blundell has made contributions to the structural biology of polypeptide hormones, growth factors, receptor activation, signal transduction, and DNA repair, DNA double-strand break repair, subjects important in cancer, tuberculosis, and familial diseases. He has developed software for protein modelling and understanding the effects of mutations on protein function, leading to new approaches to structure-guided and Fragment-based lead discovery. In 1999 he co-founded the oncology company Astex, Astex Therapeutics, which has moved ten drugs into clinical trials. Blundell has played central roles in restructuring British research councils and, as President of the UK Science Council, in developing professionalism in the practice of science. Educa ...
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Chris Abell
Christopher Abell (11 November 1957Abell, Prof Christopher. In ''Debrett's People of Today 2012'' (accessed 15 January 2012) ''(subscription required)'' – 26 October 2020) was a British biological chemist who was a professor of biological chemistry at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry and Todd-Hamied Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. On his 2016 election to the Royal Society, Abell's research was described as having "changed the face of drug discovery." Education Abell was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, gaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences in 1979 followed by PhD on the topic of polyketide biosynthesis for research supervised by James Staunton in 1982. (accessed 15 January 2013) Career and research Abell held a research fellowship in the laboratory of David E. Cane at Brown University, Providence, USA, studying terpene biosynthesis (1982–83). In 1984, Abell joined the department of chemistry of the University of Cambridge, successiv ...
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Otsuka Pharmaceutical
(), abbreviated OPC, is a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Tokyo, Osaka and Naruto, Tokushima, Naruto, Japan. The company was established August 10, 1964. History OPC's parent company Otsuka Holdings Co. Ltd. joined the Tokyo Stock Exchange through an initial public offering (IPO) on December 15, 2010, at which time Otsuka Holdings was Japan's No.2 drug maker by sales after industry leader Takeda Pharmaceutical Company. The IPO debuted at $2.4 billion, making it the largest for a pharmaceutical company up to that time. Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd Holdings In 1955, the company started a football (soccer), football club called "Otsuka Pharmaceutical SC." In 2005 the name changed to Tokushima Vortis. The club is based in Naruto. In 2008, Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. acquired 49% of Alma S.A., which is the parent company of CG Roxane. In early 2012, Otsuka announced it would focus its "future operations on CNS disorders and oncology". This decision necessitated a revision in ...
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Erdafitinib
Erdafitinib, sold under the brand name Balversa, is an anti-cancer medication. It is a small molecule inhibitor of fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) used for the treatment of cancer. FGFRs are a subset of tyrosine kinases which are unregulated in some tumors and influence tumor cell differentiation, proliferation, angiogenesis, and cell survival. Astex Pharmaceuticals discovered the drug and licensed it to Janssen Pharmaceuticals for further development. Medical uses In the United Statest, erdafitinib is indicated for the treatment of adults with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma with susceptible FGFR3 genetic alterations whose disease has progressed on or after at least one line of prior systemic therapy. In April 2019, erdafitinib was granted approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treatment of metastatic or locally advanced bladder cancer with an FGFR3 or FGFR2 alteration that has progressed beyond traditional platinum-based ...
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Ribociclib
Ribociclib, sold under the brand name Kisqali, is a medication used for the treatment of certain kinds of breast cancer. Ribociclib is a kinase inhibitor. It was developed by Novartis and Astex Pharmaceuticals. The most common side effects include infections, low levels of white blood cells, headache, cough, nausea (feeling sick), vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, tiredness, hair loss and rash. Ribociclib was approved for medical use in the United States in March 2017, in the European Union in August 2017, and in the United Kingdom in February 2021. Medical uses In the United States, it is indicated for the treatment of adults with hormone receptor (HR)-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative advanced or metastatic breast cancer in combination with an aromatase inhibitor as initial endocrine-based therapy; or fulvestrant as initial endocrine-based therapy or following disease progression on endocrine therapy in postmenopausal women or in men. In the ...
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Subsidiary
A subsidiary, subsidiary company, or daughter company is a company (law), company completely or partially owned or controlled by another company, called the parent company or holding company, which has legal and financial control over the subsidiary company. Unlike regional branches or divisions, subsidiaries are considered to be distinct entities from their parent companies; they are required to follow the laws of where they are incorporated, and they maintain their own executive leadership. Two or more subsidiaries primarily controlled by same entity/group are considered to be sister companies of each other. Subsidiaries are a common feature of modern business, and most multinational corporations organize their operations via the creation and purchase of subsidiary companies. Examples of holding companies are Berkshire Hathaway, Jefferies Financial Group, The Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Citigroup, which have subsidiaries involved in many different Industry (e ...
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X-ray Crystallography
X-ray crystallography is the experimental science of determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the crystalline structure causes a beam of incident X-rays to Diffraction, diffract in specific directions. By measuring the angles and intensities of the X-ray diffraction, a crystallography, crystallographer can produce a three-dimensional picture of the density of electrons within the crystal and the positions of the atoms, as well as their chemical bonds, crystallographic disorder, and other information. X-ray crystallography has been fundamental in the development of many scientific fields. In its first decades of use, this method determined the size of atoms, the lengths and types of chemical bonds, and the atomic-scale differences between various materials, especially minerals and alloys. The method has also revealed the structure and function of many biological molecules, including vitamins, drugs, proteins and nucleic acids such as DNA. X-ray crystall ...
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Cryo-electron Microscopy
Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a transmission electron microscopy technique applied to samples cooled to cryogenic temperatures. For biological specimens, the structure is preserved by embedding in an environment of vitreous ice. An aqueous sample solution is applied to a grid-mesh and plunge-frozen in liquid ethane or a mixture of liquid ethane and propane. While development of the technique began in the 1970s, recent advances in detector technology and software algorithms have allowed for the determination of biomolecular structures at near-atomic resolution. This has attracted wide attention to the approach as an alternative to X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy in the structural biology field. In 2017, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution." '' Nature Methods'' also named cryo- ...
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Molecular Mass
The molecular mass () is the mass of a given molecule, often expressed in units of daltons (Da). Different molecules of the same compound may have different molecular masses because they contain different isotopes of an element. The derived quantity relative molecular mass is the unitless ratio of the mass of a molecule to the atomic mass constant (which is equal to one dalton). The molecular mass and relative molecular mass are distinct from but related to the ''molar mass''. The molar mass is defined as the mass of a given substance divided by the amount of the substance, and is expressed in grams per mole (g/mol). That makes the molar mass an ''average'' of many particles or molecules (weighted by abundance of the isotopes), and the molecular mass the mass of one specific particle or molecule. The molar mass is usually the more appropriate quantity when dealing with macroscopic (weigh-able) quantities of a substance. The definition of molecular weight is most authoritat ...
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Cyclin-dependent Kinase 4
Cyclin-dependent kinase 4 (CDK4), also known as cell division protein kinase 4, is an enzyme that is encoded by the ''CDK4'' gene in humans. CDK4 is a member of the cyclin-dependent kinase family, a group of serine/threonine kinases which regulate the cell cycle. CDK4 regulates the G1/S transition by contributing to the phosphorylation of retinoblastoma (RB) protein, which leads to the release of protein factors like E2F1 that promote S-phase progression. It is regulated by cyclins like cyclin D proteins, regulatory kinases, and cyclin kinase inhibitors (CKIs). Dysregulation of the CDK4 pathway is common in many cancers, and CDK4 is a new therapeutic target in cancer treatment. Structure The CDK4 gene is located on chromosome 12 in humans. The gene is composed of 4,583 base pairs which together code for the 303 amino acid protein with a molecular mass of 33,730 Da. All CDK proteins, including CDK4, have two lobes: the smaller N-terminal lobe (which contains an inhibitory G-l ...
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Precision Medicine
Precision, precise or precisely may refer to: Arts and media * ''Precision'' (march), the official marching music of the Royal Military College of Canada * "Precision" (song), by Big Sean * ''Precisely'' (sketch), a dramatic sketch by the English playwright Harold Pinter Science, and technology, and mathematics Mathematics and computing (general) * Accuracy and precision, measurement deviation from true value and its scatter * Significant figures, the number of digits that carry real information about a measurement * Precision and recall, in information retrieval: the proportion of relevant documents returned * Precision (computer science), a measure of the detail in which a quantity is expressed * Precision (statistics), a model parameter or a quantification of precision Computing products * Dell Precision, a line of Dell workstations * Precision Architecture, former name for PA-RISC Precision Architecture reduced instruction set computer, RISC (PA-RISC) or Hewlet ...
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