AstraZeneca and Heptares Collaborate for Drug Discovery

Under the terms of the agreement, AstraZeneca has worldwide commercial rights to product candidates emerging from the collaboration.

AstraZeneca and Heptares Therapeutics signed a four-year collaboration for the potential discovery and development of new medicines targeting G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs).

GPCRs are among the largest and most important family of proteins found in the human body, yet they become highly unstable when removed from their natural membrane-bound environments. This instability has prevented pharmaceutical researchers from understanding GPCR structures and hampered efforts to design medicines that work on GPCR targets.

This collaboration brings together Heptares' GPCR discovery expertise and proprietary technologies, including its StaR? technology, which engineers stabilized receptors allowing GPCRs to be investigated, with AstraZeneca’s biopharmaceutical discovery, dev