Evotec AG is a German-based drug discovery solutions company that operates worldwide and has leading scientific experts, state-of-the-art technologies as well as key therapeutic expertise in the areas of neuroscience, pain, oncology, inflammation and cardiovascular, metabolic and infectious diseases. Its sole mission is to build a partnered product pipeline based on high quality drug discovery and science and technology through efficient collaborations. Evotec has had significant drug discovery innovations in its 20-year history. It provides drug discovery expert services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as well as to academic institutions. Evotec focuses on quality-driven services and innovative alliances. It has several significant long-term discovery alliances with well-established industry players such as Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, the CHDI Foundation, Genentech, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca and Ono Pharmaceuticals.
Moreover, the company has many existing partnerships and product candidates available in both clinical and pre-clinical development. Under these partnerships, Evotec has collaborated with Boehringer Ingelheim, MedImmune and Andromeda (Teva) in the field of diabetes. Furthermore, these partnerships extend with Janssen Pharmaceuticals in the field of depression along with Roche to assist in the area of Alzheimer’s disease. According to Alpha Deal Group’s recent report, Evotec has generated 100 lead series, 30 pre-clinical candidates and 20 clinical compounds. It recently introduced a rich Phase 3-1 product pipeline, which includes first in class targets. The company has profitably been growing its business, driven by milestones and a strong cash position.
Evotec AG as a leading industrial application partner will be responsible for four key objectives: adaptation of hierarchical GPCR modelling protocol (HGMP) to HPC platform, developing of the new HGMP-HPC based tools / plugins that require high scale calculations, testing and application of HGMP-HPC integrated technology in real drug discovery cases within the CoE and to make it available to third parties seeking assistance from the CoE and/or from Evotec, and dissemination of the results of this work to our partners in academia and in pharma & biotech companies in order to stimulate follow-on research. Evotec will also to publish the outcome of this work in peer-reviewed journals and at scientific conferences.
Key Personnel
Dr Mike Bodkin – Vice President of Research Informatics at Evotec and leads the computational chemistry, systems integration, data management and software support groups. He has recently joined Evotec after a long career at Lilly where he was head of computational drug discovery. Mike obtained his PhD from the crystallography department at Birkbeck College, University of London, followed by a post-doc at Cambridge University. He took up a position with AstraZeneca working in respiratory and inflammation before moving to Lilly in 2000 focusing on neurodegeneration, psychiatry and pain. Mike has a broad experience of discovery stretching more than 20 years and has developed a strong collaborative network across the globe including Pharma, Biotechs and several key academics. His research aims are to continue to develop new algorithms and software in the fields of drug discovery and systems informatics and to deliver and apply current and novel methods as tools for use in drug research.
Dr Alexander Heifetz – Former Royal Society Industry Fellow and a Principal Scientist in the computational chemistry team at Evotec. In 2001 he obtained his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, under the supervision of former Israeli president and Foreign Member of the Royal Society Prof Ephraim Katzir and Dr Miriam Eisenstein. As a senior computational chemist Dr Heifetz has more than 17 years of experience in the drug discovery industry (EPIX Pharmaceuticals until 2005, at Biosystem Informatics (BII) Institute Newcastle until 2007 and at Evotec from 2007 – present) and was involved in the discovery of 4 clinical drug candidates for the treatment of anxiety, major depressive disorder, pulmonary hypertension, and Alzheimer’s disease. He has more than 35 patents and more than 40 peer- reviewed publications in the areas of medicinal chemistry and molecular modelling [1-9]. In 2011 he received a Royal Society Industry Award for GPCR modelling and in this framework developed a novel hierarchical GPCR modelling protocol (HGMP) to support structure-based drug discovery programs. HGMP has been applied in many drug discovery programs. In 2018 he edited a book ‘Computational Methods for GPCR Drug Discovery’ published by Springer as part of the “Methods in Molecular Biology” series.
Dr Michelle Southey – Completed her doctoral degree at the University of Bristol under the supervision of Professor Jeremy Harvey, studying the mechanism of action of enzymes using hybrid QM/MM methods. She then worked as a computational chemist in the department of pharmacy and pharmacology at the University of Bath providing in silico drug discovery support on departmental projects. Michelle has been at Evotec since June 2009 becoming a Team Leader in the Research Informatics department in 2017.