GVK Biosciences today announced that it has licensed its popular SAR, PK and Toxicity Database (GOSTAR) to the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA). The material transfer agreement forms the basis of collaboration in Drug Repositioning, wherein the initial focus will be to identify alternative therapeutic indications of marketed compounds for neglected and orphan diseases.

GVK BIO developed a proprietary 'Drug Repurposing Platform' with eight different approaches to address the drug repurposing challenge. The platform will use data from GVKBIO proprietary databases such as SAR databases (GOSTAR), Biomarker database (GOBIOM) and other public databases.

GOSTAR, a manually curated database, has been developed over the span of a decade by a team comprising of more than 200 scientists. The database and application is being used globally by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as well as academia and has been cited in numerous publications. GOSTAR contains over 6.5 million compounds manually curated through the manual screening of over 2.5 million patents and 400,000 journals and it also contains more than 18 million quantitative SAR points.

Sreeni Devidas, Vice President, Business Development said "The collaboration with the USFDA is a validation of the utility of GOSTAR in multiple applications. Specifically the ROI generated by the use in Drug Repositioning is unparalleled. GVK BIO will work with the USFDA to further enhance the Repositioning and Repurposing workflow and make it available to the entire research community".

GOSTAR is the final outcome after the integration of over fifteen individual databases, which includes the complete chemical space for ten of the popular biological targets. In addition to this, the MedChem Databases include all published and patented inhibitors against biological targets that exceed 6,500 in number. GOSTAR also has four Toxicity and Natural Products databases.

Manni Kantipudi, CEO, GVK Biosciences said "Drug Repositioning is gaining traction in the industry and in academia, and is becoming a mandatory component of the Drug Development Process. The GOSTAR product will prove valuable in allowing researchers to use multiple Repositioning and Repurposing approaches and address multiple targets in parallel. We look forward to continue working and collaborating with the FDA with a view to further enhancing the utility of the product."