TargetEx Ltd. is an SME working on the field of biotechnology. TargetEx was established in 2002 and it is a privately held company. TargetEx offers clients ‘off the shelf’ services and collaborative research and development alliances. Core competences of the company are protein expression (protein engineering and expressing gene sequences across various expression systems), cell and target-based assay development and HT screening as well as from target to hit/lead integrated services. TargetEx offers cellular and biochemical assays covering most of the major target classes.
TargetEx has a comprehensive track record in various research collaborations and discovery programs (anticancer, cardiovascular, CNS drug discovery involving PDE’s, MMP’s, kinase and GPCR target families). TargetEx was a member of the FP6 project between 2007-2010, acronymed as CancerGrid (from 2009 TargetEx became the coordinator, www.cancergrid.eu; involving 11 partners from 7 countries and budgeted almost EUR 4 million as total costs.), to develop new methods to identify anticancer compounds and to find lead molecules in case of certain types of cancers. In frame of the CancerGrid project, the toxicity of over 30000 compounds was tested on HCT116 colon tumour cell line and the hit molecules were further characterized on a normal cell line.
TargetEx was involved in several integrated projects including chemoinformatics, protein expression, assay development and biological screening. In 2013 a Eureka project was granted for TargetEx entitled “Selective Anti-Alzheimer multitargeting of Bace-1 and acetylcholinesterase (SAMBA)” (Project ID: 7 211, http://www.eurekanetwork.org/project//id/7211). SAMBA is an integrated drug discovery project to develop optimized pre-clinical candidates against Alzheimer disease acting as dual inhibitors of BACE-1 and Acetylcholinesterase.
Recently TargetEx is involved in a EuroStars Programme (E!9360-NEWHS4PCR) to develop a new quality class of PCR reagents.