Biovitrum has found a buyer for its UK drug discovery subsidiary, Cambridge Biotechnology Ltd (CBT).

Kings College spin-out, Proximagen Neuroscience plc, has signed a letter of intent with Biovitrum to acquire CBT for a percentage of future revenues generated from the Cambridge company’s pipeline of drug targets.

Details of London-based Proximagen’s plans for CBT’s staff or the location of its future operations are yet to be revealed with the deal not expected to complete before mid-November.

CBT’s world-class expertise lies in the identification and validation of new drug-targets and in the discovery of small-molecule modulators of these targets with all the properties required for subsequent development and progression into clinical trials.

The company is based at the Babraham Research Campus and has a healthy R & D pipeline with current discovery efforts focused on specialist indications including neuropathic pain and inflammatory diseases such as vasculitis.

Listed on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM list, Proximagen specialises in novel drugs and treatments for neurodegenerative disease and raised a massive £50 million in June 2009 through a shares placing to fund the acquisition of a number of drug programmes and commercial prospects in its preferred therapeutic area of the central nervous system.

Swedish pharmaceutical, Biovitrum, first announced its intention to drop all small molecules activities, which included the divestment of CBT, over 10 months ago as part of a refocus of its research activities.

The plan was to either sell or shut down CBT by Spring 2009, but this was put back to the Summer and then the third quarter of the year before the deal was finally struck in October.

CBT was established in 2001, its founding team a combination of researchers from a Pfizer Global R & D drug discovery team in what had previously been the Parke-Davis Neuroscience Research Centre in Cambridge as well as some key academic collaborators.