Viva Biotech and HQL Pharmaceuticals Join Forces to Form Powerhouse for Structure – and Fragment – Based Drug Discovery

SHANGHAI & REHOVOT, Israel.

Viva Biotech Ltd., a leading company in structure-based and fragment based drug discovery services, based in Shanghai, China, and HQL Pharmaceuticals Ltd., a drug discovery company utilizing its super-power proprietary ChemSpace Scanner (CSS™) computational technology, based in Rehovot, Israel, today announced that they have entered into a strategic alliance to jointly provide a fully-integrated drug discovery services, focused on leads generation based on fragment screening.

Under the terms of the agreement, Viva and HQL will jointly provide their customers accelerated and cost effective comprehensive drug discovery services, from targets into early development, with an aim of providing set of diverse high quality novel drug candidates with a wide IP protection for the client’s targets,. The collaboration is based on Viva’s world-class SBDD / FBDD capabilities and HQL’s fragments to leads breakthrough computational solution.

Dr. Cheney Mao, CEO of Viva, said: “Viva Biotech works on several hundred potential drug targets and runs active FBDD/SBDD drug discovery projects for several dozen major pharmaceutical companies every year. We are very pleased to establish this strategic alliance with HQL and access to their powerful computational chemistry technology. By synergizing our capabilities with HQL’s, we expect to offer our existing and new customers a clear and substantial added value to their projects.”

Tal Parnes, CEO of HQL, said: “Once we had a lab proof of our fragments to leads breakthrough capabilities, we were looking to partner with a world-class SBDD/FBDD CRO, to embed these capabilities into a fully integrated drug-discovery service. We are very happy that Viva’s team sees eye to eye with us the potential of this collaboration and we are thrilled for the opportunity to jointly offer this toolkit with Viva.”

About Viva Biotech Ltd.

Viva Biotech (www.vivabiotech.com) is privately owned and financed by leading investors in the United States. It is a well-established contract research organization that provides preclinical drug discovery research services to the pharmaceutical industry worldwide. The core capabilities of the company include its leading protein crystallography and structure based drug design, a MS based screening technology with a proprietary fragment library, a novel proprietary technology for GPCR target preparation, crystallization and applications for both small molecule and large molecule drug discovery, lead antibody generation capability by phage display or hybridoma approach, and other preclinical drug discovery research capabilities such as DMPK, animal disease models for CNS and oncology.

About HQL Pharmaceuticals Ltd.

Based in Rehovot, Israel, HQL Pharmaceuticals (www.hql.co.il) is a Biotech company that utilizes its proprietary computational technology to fundamentally change the way drug discovery is conducted. HQL’s revolutionary CSS™ computational technology enables highly efficient screening of chemical libraries of more than 20 orders of magnitude higher than currently possible, against high resolution, 3 dimensional drug models. The CSS platform is designed to tackle extremely tough challenges such as linking fragments into drug-like leads and the design of small molecule inhibitors of protein-protein interaction. HQL is privately owned and financed by investors in Israel and in the US.

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