Axxam has appointed Rose A. Lance to lead the company’s business development efforts in North America. Based in Boston, MA in the United States, Ms. Lance will be responsible for marketing and promotion of discovery services and products for the rapidly-growing biotechnology company. She has more than 20 years of experience performing market analysis, in-licensing, product management, strategic planning and forecasting in life science markets.
Before joining Axxam, Rose A. Lance conducted business development for 454 Life Sciences in Brandford, CT. Previously, she worked for companies such as Boehringer Mannheim, NovoNordisk and DAKO Corp.
Rose received her Bachelor of Science in Microbiology from Southern Illinois University, USA.

The contribution of Axxam to Italian business was rewarded by Unioncamere, the organization uniting all of the Italian Chambers of Commerce, with the recent presentation in Rome of the prestigious Premio Unioncamere. Axxam received the Young Innovative Company award for 2006. The company was one of 14 entrepreneurs chosen from 300 nominations of companies from all over Italy.

Dompé pha.r.ma s.p.a. and Axxam SpA announced a research collaboration for the discovery and development of novel drugs based on GPCR targets. Scientists from both companies will contribute to the drug discovery and development process for relevant disease targets. Steps in the process include target identification,assay development, library assembly, screening, medicinal chemistry, hit to lead optimization, pharmacology, and preclinical and clinical development. Dompé pha.r.ma will bring expertise in the field of medicinal chemistry, oriented to the rational drug design of small molecular weight GPCRs modulators and in the pre-clinical and clinical development of innovative drugs. Axxam will contribute its own experience and know-how in target biology, assay development and high-throughput screening.

Axxam announced today that it has signed an agreement with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide access to a selection of screening assays of special interest to the NIH Chemical Genomics Centre (NCGC) for use in the screening campaigns within the Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative.
The screening assays were developed and optimized at Axxam for ultra high-throughput screening (uHTS) applications using ultra sensitive signal detection methods.
"We are very pleased to collaborate with the NIH Chemical Genomics Centre in support of their screening efforts," stated Dr. Lia Scarabottolo, head of cell biology at Axxam. "We believe that our expertise in the uHTS sector, with a particular emphasis on cell-based assays and their use in large screening campaigns, could provide an important contribution to the future success of the Roadmap initiative at the NCGC."
About the NCGC and the NIH Roadmap Initiative
The NCGC is an ultrahigh-throughput screening and chemistry centre which discovers chemical probes of gene and cell functions across the genome using its quantitative HTS (qHTS) technology, and develops new paradigms for screening that enable chemical genomics and downstream drug development. Located within the National Human Genome Research Institute as part of the NIH Roadmap, all of the NCGC's results are made freely available via PubChem (http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). NIH Roadmap for Medical research is a series of far-reaching initiatives designed to transform the Nation's medical research capabilities and speed the movement of scientific discoveries from the bench to the bedside. It provides a framework of the priorities the NIH must address in order to optimize its entire research portfolio and lays out a vision for a more efficient and productive system of medical research. Additional information about the NCGC can be found at www.ncgc.nih.gov, about the NIH Roadmap at http://nihroadmap.nih.gov, and about the NIH at www.nih.gov.