AMRI has signed a five-year extension and expansion of its ongoing research collaboration with CHDI Foundation, Inc. (CHDI), focused on the discovery of new therapeutic agents for the treatment of Huntington’s disease (HD).

Further deploying its fully integrated drug discovery services model, AMRI will apply a complete menu of integrated biology and chemistry capabilities including assay development, screening, library production, hit identification, ADMET, computer-aided drug discovery (CADD), and medicinal chemistry. AMRI and CHDI initiated this collaboration in April 2009 with a focus on screening samples from AMRI’s compound collection against several JNK kinases.

“The extension and expansion of this agreement with CHDI further supports the ability of AMRI’s fully integrated global drug discovery platform to provide significant added-value to its customers seeking to reduce costs, compress timelines and increase the productivity of their discovery portfolio. We are pleased to continue to work with CHDI to help develop potential treatments for Huntington’s disease,” said AMRI chairman and chief executive officer Thomas E. D’Ambra, Ph.D.