Materia Announces NIH Funding for the Development of Advanced Reagent System for Drug Discovery

The program, jointly conducted with Dr. Paul Hanson at the University of Kansas through a National Institutes of Health Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant, will use Materia’s proprietary Ring Opening Metathesis (ROM) catalysts to generate broadly-applicable reagents and matrices for drug development.

These tools will be used by pharmaceutical researchers to aid compound design via efficient modification of functional handles, as well as simplifying the resulting compounds’ purification.

“Drug discovery companies are constantly searching for more efficient methods to generate drug-like chemical libraries,” stated Dr. Hanson.

“The flexibility of our first systems to handle diverse chemistries has already attracted considerable industry interest. This funding should expand the reagent offering as well as enable further optimization and scale up.”

“We are excited to strengthen our relationship with Dr. Hanson and the University of Kansas,” followed Dr. Michael Giardello, Materia’s Chief Executive Officer.

“We have already licensed several technologies from Dr. Hanson’s laboratory and hope that this exciting program will complement Materia’s existing product offering to the pharmaceutical industry.”