Domainex Announces Enlisting of Shin Kitaoka of BioGemini to support its Expansion into the Japanese Drug Discovery Market

Wed, 07/10/2015 - 09:00

Cambridge, UK, 7th October 2015 / Sciad NewswireDomainex Ltd. is pleased to announce that it is enlisting the support of Shin Kitaoka of BioGemini Ltd. to provide advice on expansion into the Japanese market. Mr Kitaoka has over 35 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. He is an expert on drug development in Japan and is a well-known speaker on issues concerning drug development and partnerships with Japanese companies. Mr Kitaoka has experience in all therapeutic areas and a special interest and strong track record in oncology and respiratory diseases, and in preclinical and early stage clinical assets. Prior to BioGemini, Shin spent 13 years at SmithKline Beecham in Japan then at GSK in London. He led business development in Japan for Glaxo and was the first Japanese national to be employed at the company’s London headquarters.

Upon becoming the Japan Strategist for Domainex, Mr Shin Kitaoka stated “Domainex has a highly attractive set of technologies and a huge experience base that can address unmet drug discovery needs for the Japanese market, as well as a range of proprietary programmes. I am looking forward to supporting the Domainex team’s expansion into Japan so that Japanese companies can benefit from their expertise.”

Dr. Thomas Mander COO of Domainex commented that “We are delighted to welcome Shin to Domainex. He is a tireless ambassador for the companies he represents and he has an extensive network of business relationships with senior decision-makers at a range of Japanese pharmaceutical and life science organizations. We are looking forward to Shin helping us to introduce our drug discovery assets and services to the Japanese market.”

Japanese Pharmaceutical industries R&D expenditure is now over 15 billion USD with a pharmaceutical market estimated to be worth 128 billion USD by 2018

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Editors Notes

About Domainex

Domainex Ltd. is a Cambridge-based small-molecule drug discovery company that provides integrated drug discovery services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology and academic partners globally. Services cover a wide span of the drug discovery value chain, from disease target validation to pre-clinical candidate nomination. Domainex's services include recombinant protein expression and use of its proprietary technology platform, Combinatorial Domain Hunting to identify soluble protein fragments for structural biology and assay development. Hit finding activities encompass assay development and screening utilising its Bioassay Builder and LeadBuilder portfolios. The core of the service platform is undertaking multi-parameter medicinal chemistry optimisation of hits and leads under the mantra ‘every compound counts’, which can save up to 30% of average industry time.

Additionally, Domainex is investing in developing its own therapeutic compounds for out-licensing in two specific areas: 1) Inhibitors of the kinases TBK1 & IKK epsilon to treat inflammatory conditions such as COPD and psoriasis; 2) The emerging epigenetic target class of lysine methyltransferases potentially implicated in oncology, where to date Domainex has built a portfolio of drug discovery assets encompassing novel chemical matter, proprietary assays and crystal structures.

For more information please visit www.domainex.co.uk

For more information please contact:
Domainex
Tom Mander

Chief Operating Officer
tom.mander@domainex.co.uk
Tel +44 (0)7584 578024

Media Relations (Domainex)
Sylvie Berrebi
sylvie@sciad.com
M: +44 (0)7795 197271

Deborah Cockerill
deborah@sciad.com
M: +44 (0)7930 317729