Riken subscribes to Inpharmatica's Biopendium

UK-based Inpharmatica has revealed that Japan's Riken Institute has taken a non-exclusive subscription to its proteome annotation resource, Biopendium. No financial details of the agreement were disclosed.

"It is very important to select the most scientifically-interesting protein targets for structural and functional determination. We don't want to waste time determining structures that turn out to have limited value. Inpharmatica's Biopendium is the best resource of its kind in this field and will be a valuable tool in achieving this objective since it is capable of providing quality annotation over more of the proteome than any other commercially-available resource," stated Professor Yokoyama, director of the Riken Institute.

Riken is leading US and European rivals in the race to identify protein molecules and analyze their functions, according to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. The institute is reported to have described the structures of 150 molecules in fiscal 2002, compared with just over 120 protein structures discovered by researchers from the USA. Furthermore, most of this research was centered around human and mouse proteins, which can lead directly to drug development, noted the newspaper.