Tripos to Host Research Fellows in England

PHARMACEUTICAL RESEARCH

Tripos has been awarded a $1.1 million Marie Curie Fellowship for Transfer of Knowledge by the European Union. The grant, awarded under the EU's Sixth Framework Programme for Research & Technological Development (FP6), will pay to send seven chemistry and biology research fellows to work on drug lead discovery and development at Tripos Discovery Research (TDR) in Bude, England, for 18 months each over the next four years. Researchers, to be recruited from continental Europe, are expected to begin work in Bude this year.

The FP6 program, the EU's main source of research funding, is designed to promote scientific excellence and to improve Europe's competitiveness in science-related business.

Life sciences and health-related genomics and biotechnology, information technology, and sustainable development are the key areas of focus in the FP6 program, which has a total budget of about $22 billion. Universities, research institutes, and corporations are equally eligible for FP6 grants.

Tripos, a drug research software company headquartered in St. Louis, launched its drug discovery operations in 1997 with the acquisition of Receptor Research. That firm was one in a cluster of small pharmaceutical-based research companies that Tripos CEO John P. McAlister III has called a "cottage industry" of chemistry around Bude. The company completed a $25 million expansion of the operation in Bude in 2003. Drug discovery accounted for more than half of the firm's 2004 revenues of $65 million.

Tripos, according to McAlister, has endeavored to develop its two businesses--research information technology and drug discovery--in tandem over the past seven years into a knowledge-based methodology for drug discovery centered at TDR.