Astex Pharmaceuticals
pharmaceutical company
Astex Pharmaceuticals is a biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of drugs in oncology and diseases of the central nervous system. Astex was founded in 1999 by Sir Tom Blundell, Chris Abell and Harren Jhoti, and is located in Cambridge, England.
Astex is part of the Otsuka group of companies and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.
History
Astex was founded as "Astex Technology Limited" in 1999 in Cambridge, UK, to pioneer a novel approach to small molecule drug discovery known as ‘fragment-based drug discovery’ (FBDD), a term first coined by Astex scientists that is now a well recognized approach to small molecule drug discovery across the pharmaceutical industry. Astex's proprietary drug discovery platform, Pyramid, can effectively identify novel small molecule drugs for key disease targets. Originally funded by venture capital, from a number of investors including Abingworth, Advent international, Oxford Bioscience Partners, Apax Partners and Gimv. Astex established strategic partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies including Novartis, Janssen Pharmaceuticals and GlaxoSmithKline.
In 2005, the company changed its name to Astex Therapeutics Limited when its first product entered clinical development. In 2011, Astex Therapeutics Limited and SuperGen, Inc.
“Astex Pharmaceuticals” enters the record as pharmaceutical company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Astex, Pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q106995996. Authority coordinates are 52.237, 0.140. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2005 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Astex Pharmaceuticals” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.