News

Kent, UK and St Louis, MO USA (17th February, 2014) Venomtech, the United Kingdom’s only commercial venom supplier, announced today that Mayflower Bioscience, a distributor of unique life science research products, will distribute the Targeted Venom Discovery ArrayTM (T-VDATM) products in North America and Canada. This new format of biological libraries focuses on drug discovery targets to produce a fractionated venom library optimised for hit and lead generation. These are the only venom libraries delivered in Labcyte Echo®-qualified microplates for acoustic dispensing. These 384-well and 1536-well plates enable researchers to use the Echo® liquid handler (Labcyte) to enhance the safety and accuracy of the manipulation of venoms.

“A variety of venoms have shown great utility in disease areas such as pain, cancer, antimicrobials, immunology, growth factors and haematology,” said Steven Trim, founder of Venomtech. “Scientific literature is rapidly growing around the use of venom components as novel leads and therapeutics for targets such as ion channels, enzymes, GPCRs and many others. We have therefore designed our libraries for finding new hits to these targets and also offer a full hit-to-lead development service based on our extensive drug discovery and venom experience.”

The Targeted Venom Discovery ArrayTM is specifically designed to maximise discovery of new drug leads and tools. Venom peptides blocking ion channels and GPCRs in disease

areas such as pain, antibiotics and cardiovascular disease are the next generation of therapeutics. Venoms from theraphosids (tarantulas), scorpions and snakes are rich sources of new drug discovery tools. These targeted arrays contain pure venom fractions from 12, 24, 48 or 96 species optimised for identification of novel tools. Each array contains characterised venoms active in specific pathways from the literature to act as positive controls. The other venom fractions making up the library have been specially selected by the company’s drug discovery scientists to maximise novel hit potential.

This expanding class of screening arrays is applicable to nearly all classes of drug targets and disease areas. Although well known in the ion channel field, venom peptides and proteins have utility in almost every aspect of modern drug discovery.

About Venomtech

Venomtech, the only commercial venom laboratory in the UK, already has a global reach and reputation. This agreement will greatly strengthen our ability to provide drug discovery solutions in North America. Our strong pharmaceutical background is evidenced through our product portfolio which is designed to facilitate biological drug discovery. Our constantly increasing library and format flexibility enables us to keep up with the fast pace of drug discovery technologies since venoms remain quick and as easy to develop as drug leads. Venomtech harnesses the power of evolution to maximise your hit potential. Find out more at www.venomtech.co.uk.

About Mayflower

Mayflower Bioscience commercialises innovative life science research products and services. Our goal is to identify the most exciting new life science technologies and bring these to our customers, who work in all areas of biological research. We seek out new technologies for our customers that will advance their research and help them to make breakthrough discoveries. And we aim to bring our supplier's products to market as quickly and effectively as possible. Headquartered in St. Louis, MO, we are well placed to support our customers across the US and beyond, and experienced at developing new ideas and ventures. Find out more at www.mayflowerbio.com.