NUVISAN ICB GmbH, a Germany-based fully integrated contract research service provider for drug discovery and development, announced on Tuesday that it has received a grant from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for an integrated program on discovery and early development of novel non-hormonal contraceptive medicines.

The company has received a three-year grant of USD9.6m from the foundation to produce a range of programs based on various promising human protein targets, set up tools and assays, perform high-throughput screening (HTS) of a library of up to 2.46 million compounds to find chemical hits that are suitable for pharmacological intervention, and further optimise these hits to in vivo lead compounds during the hit-to-lead process.

Arnoud Huisman, managing director of NUVISAN ICB and chief strategy officer of the NUVISAN group, said, 'Addressing the unmet family planning and birth control needs of women and their families worldwide is a global challenge and an exciting motivation for us at NUVISAN. We appreciate the foundation's trust and are delighted to contribute our scientists' long-standing pharma expertise and our integrated drug discovery and development capabilities to this program, to eventually bring new non-hormonal contraceptive medicines to the clinic.'