Astex Pharmaceuticals is to be sold to Otsuka Pharmaceutical.
It has been announced that Astex Pharmaceuticals, co-founded by Sir Tom Blundell in 1999, is to be sold to Japanese company Otsuka Pharmaceutical for $886M. Astex has been developing drugs to treat cancer and uses fragment-based drug discovery, a method under continued development also in the Department. See the story on the University news website.