Daiichi Pharmaceutical and Celestar Lexico-Sciences Completes Joint Research on Genome Drug.

Tokyo, Japan, Dec 5, 2005 - (JCN) - Daiichi Sankyo announced on December 5 that its wholly owned subsidiary Daiichi Pharmaceutical has successfully completed a 5-year joint research project it carried out with Celestar Lexico-Sciences (CLS) with significant results.

Using CLS' proprietary in silico prediction technology, the collaboration has identified more than 220 protein-protein interactions, of which 44 disease-related interactions are currently patent pending.

Moreover, one of the results, "Activation of Telomerase by mitogen-activated protein kinase-activated protein kinase 3" was presented at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Cancer Association. The result is expected to serve a drug discovery target for the treatment of cancer.

Going forward, Daiichi Pharmaceutical will proceed with research on the newly-discovered protein-protein interactions with a view to leveraging them in the development of products.

Meanwhile, CLS plans to combine the in silico prediction technology with its proprietary large-scale in situ Hybridization (LisH) technique for applications in the drug target discovery and the safety evaluation of compounds while improving its technological capabilities.

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