Friday, August 20, 2010

Broad Institute licenses ChemAxon chemical software products

By Michelle Lang

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has entered into a licensing deal with Hungary-based ChemAxon Ltd. in which the Cambridge institute will license the company’s discovery and desktop toolkits.

The Broad Institute has used ChemAxon’s JChem platform toolkit in archiving small molecules.

“This adoption is a part of our strategy to provide our scientists in the Chemical Biology Platform with the most modern and capable tools to accelerate our research,” said Michael Foley, director of the Broad’s Chemical Biology Platform, in a prepared statement..

No financial terms of the licensing agreement were disclosed.

ChemAxon makes cheminformatics software development platforms for the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries.

The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute was founded in 2003 as a medicine research institution that, as of July, operates as a non-profit organization. The institute relies on genome-based knowledge as the backbone for 100 faculty and 1,500 researchers. It appointed its first board of directors in October, naming 14 global leaders in medicine, science, education, law, finance and business as its members.