Advinus Therapeutics, the TATA promoted pharmaceutical R&D company, announced that it has received the first year milestone in its R&D collaboration with Takeda Pharmaceutical. The achievement of this milestone underscores the success of the collaboration and also provides validation of Advinus' capabilities in innovative drug discovery and Takeda's confidence in these capabilities. As a consequence, a payment of $3 million will be made by Takeda to Advinus to mark the achievement.

"Achievement of the rather challenging first year milestone can be attributed to the truly collaborative nature of our relationship with Takeda as well as Advinus' young talent's ability to solve complex problems with efficiency and speed," said Kasim Mookhtiar, CSO of Advinus.

In October 2012, Advinus and Takeda announced a multi-year multi-project collaboration in the area of drug discovery. In this venture, Advinus is responsible for carrying out all the research required to identify candidate molecules for clinical development in several therapeutic areas while Takeda is responsible for the development and commercialization of these candidates.