Advinus Therapeutics, a TATA Enterprise, Meets Year 1 Milestone in Drug Discovery Alliance

PUNE, India, January 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Advinus Therapeutics Ltd., the TATA promoted pharmaceutical R&D company, announced today that it has received the first year milestone in its Research and Development Collaboration with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited. The achievement of this milestone underscores the success of the collaboration and also provides validation of Advinus' capabilities in innovative drug discovery and Takeda's confidence in these capabilities. As a consequence, a payment of $3 Mn. will be made by Takeda to Advinus to mark the achievement.

In October 2012, Advinus and Takeda announced a multi-year multi-project collaboration in the area of drug discovery. In this collaboration, Advinus is responsible for carrying out all the research required to identify candidate molecules for clinical development in several therapeutic areas while Takeda is responsible for the development and commercialization of these candidates.

"Achievement of the rather challenging first year milestone can be attributed to the truly collaborative nature of our relationship with Takeda as well as Advinus' young talent's ability to solve complex problems with efficiency and speed," said Kasim Mookhtiar, CSO of Advinus.

About Advinus:

Advinus Therapeutics is a research-based pharma company founded by global pharma executives and promoted by the TATA group. The company is the first-of-its-kind in India to offer end-to-end development services to the global pharma, agro and biotech industry while creating long term value through internal and collaborative Drug Discovery. The primary focus of the company's discovery efforts are in metabolic diseases, inflammatory diseases and pain/neurodegeneration. Advinus also has an interest in pursuing the discovery of novel therapies for neglected or developing world diseases. Advinus' drug development operations supports and supplements the client resources at increased levels of cost-efficiency by providing services in the areas of process development, drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics, clinical pharmacology, safety assessment, formulation development and analytical R&D. For company information, visit Advinus at www.advinus.com.

Primary Media Contact: Joshua Daniel, [email protected], 91-9880810448