20th September 2010 - Research agreement combines leading expertise to discover marine natural product inhibitors of O-GlcNAcase - Aquapharm Biodiscovery, a leading marine biotechnology company, announced it has signed a research agreement with Dundee University to help it develop new drugs based on marine natural products that may help in the fight against Alzheimer's.Alzheimer's is a disease marked by the formation of insoluble protein aggregates in the brain with associated progressive degeneration of the neurons. The collaboration is aimed at O-GIcNAcase, a well-documented target for Alzheimer's, that modulates the solubility of the protein in these aggregates but that has been difficult to target with conventional small-molecule libraries. It therefore forms an ideal opportunity to demonstrate that Aquapharm's growing collection of novel and diverse marine-derived compounds and scaffolds can modulate a clinically attractive but pharmacologically challenging target for a disease for which new solutions are urgently required... [PDF] Aquapharm Biodiscovery's Press Release -
