Bristol-Myers Squibb has inked a five-year drug discovery and synthesis alliance with the Scripps Research Institute. Scripps will support research activity at B-MS through application of its novel chemistry capabilities and plans to ink similar deals in the future.
“This arrangement is exemplary of our forward-looking corporate partnership strategy, as the first of what we hope will be many such agreements existing in parallel”, Scott Forrest, vice president for business development at Scripps Research, said.
Scripps will prepare novel synthetic intermediates and analogs through use of its chemistry methods. Each of these will then undergo biological evaluation against B-MS targets to assess their suitability.
The Carbon Trust has accredited Covance’s UK facilities. Gaining the Carbon Trust Standard shows the sites in Alnwick, Harrogate, Leeds, and Maidenhead meet the organisation’s requirements for management of greenhouse gases.
Lucy Hind, head of facilities at Covance in Harrogate, said: “The Carbon Trust Standard recognition affirms our strategy to reduce our carbon footprint on the environment, and with it, our overall energy consumption.”
Covance attributed the accreditation to its facilities management practices. Through use of an energy reporting and other strategies Covance claims to have cut its emissions from its four UK facilities.
The effort benefits the business. Ann Towler, Covance process excellence, said cuts to carbon emissions are an “important component of our global business strategy [and the] environmental efficiencies benefit our bottom line.”
GenScript has expanded its gene synthesis services to include the building of large DNA fragments. Companies using the service, called Gene-Brick, can have long DNA fragments, of around 10kb in length, synthesised by GenScript for use in the building of genetic circuits or synthetic chromosomes.
The New Jersey-based CRO (contract research organisation) is promising 100 per cent sequence accuracy for its 8kb to 13kb full-length synthetic DNA fragments.