Arena Pharmaceuticals Joins SDSC Industrial Partners Program

Published 05/05/2001

The San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, has announced that Arena Pharmaceuticals, Inc., of San Diego (Nasdaq: ARNA), a postgenomics biopharmaceutical company pursuing technologies to help discover drugs for conditions ranging from obesity to heart disease, has become the newest member of SDSC's Science and Technology Outreach program.

"We're delighted to be collaborating with Arena," said SDSC Deputy Director for Development Kevin Franklin. "The company's focus on leading-edge rational drug design, combined with SDSC's long experience and expertise in computational biology and bioinformatics, creates natural opportunities for mutually beneficial collaboration."

Arena Pharmaceuticals is an "opportunity-conscious" drug discovery firm. Arena researchers use a group of techniques they have dubbed CART, for Constitutively Activated Receptor Technology, focusing on cellular receptors that can be activated or inactivated to produce or avoid a given biological response.

"This collaboration is off to a positive start," said Arena Pharmaceuticals President and CEO Jack Lief. Arena researchers have been using NPACI's Blue Horizon at SDSC to identify receptors that might be targets for pharmaceuticals. "We were able to use the supercomputer to investigate a broad range of possible drug targets in just a fraction of the time it would have taken on our own equipment. We expect that working with SDSC will enable us to tackle a wealth of new genomic information," Lief said.

Over 50 commercial, government, and private organizations are members of SDSC's Science and Technology Outreach program. Membership includes broad access to the center's resources, including scientific databases, high-performance computers, a spectrum of applications packages, a world-class scientific visualization laboratory, and, most importantly, the opportunity to work with the center's researchers in computer and computational sciences. Each partnership answers a company's needs with a specific mix of the center's resources. Specialized training, education, and collaborative research and development have been undertaken successfully with a variety of enterprises. SDSC is interested in developing long-term collaborative relationships on research projects of mutual interest. For further information, contact Kevin Franklin at franklin@sdsc.edu or 858-822-3684.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center is a research unit of the University of California, San Diego, and the leading-edge site of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. SDSC is sponsored by the National Science Foundation through NPACI and by other federal agencies, the State and the University of California, and private organizations. For additional information about SDSC, see http://www.sdsc.edu/ or contact David Hart at dhart@sdsc.edu or 858-534-8314.

Contact:
David Hart, SDSC
858-534-8314, dhart@sdsc.edu