Schering Expands LION bioscience Collaboration

LION bioscience AG has signed a six-year global licensing deal with Schering AG for LION DiscoveryCenter, an open platform that integrates cross-functional data and applications for better drug discovery research. Financial details were not disclosed.

“We are pleased by the continuation of our collaboration with Schering, which has great significance for our company,” said Dr. Daniel Keesman, Chief Business Officer of LION bioscience. “The order volume, including maintenance and service, substantially exceeds that of comparable integration platform license deals for LION bioscience AG. The contract length of six years is also significantly longer than our previous platform deals,” Keesman continued. “With the modular and open design of its systems, LION is responding to the needs of its customers. Through the integration of leading third-party software as well as our own application solutions, LION is opening up further growth potential.”

The Berlin-based pharmaceutical company plans to deploy the LION DiscoveryCenter integration platform for the establishment of its enterprise-wide target validation platform. This represents an expansion and follow-up to the successful creation of a corporate gene database that LION already provided to Schering. That project was begun by NetGenics, which LION acquired last year.

“The integration of public and proprietary data with the results from our internal target validation efforts within a platform that is accessible throughout our company will further improve and accelerate our research in the future,” said Prof. Dr. Bjoern Wallmark, Head of Corporate Research at Schering AG.

LION DiscoveryCenter is scalable, and its open architecture with pre-established APIs (application programming interfaces) makes it customizable for industry-standard applications.