At our rather start out, we clarified our guiding concepts as our philosophy, corporate message and vision. Our philosophy is always to contribute toward bettering the health of people across the planet by the provision of impressive and reputable pharmaceutical products. Our corporate message is the fact that we will be the ?Top rated Light for Existence? to supply world-class state-of-the-art pharmaceuticals that promise persons from throughout the planet a more healthy existence (two). For patients and their families and for ourselves, we have now further condensed our message into the phrase ?Shifting tomorrow? (3). We went on to choose ?VISION 2015? as our management vision to be able to present how Astellas must search from the 12 months 2015. In this vision, we constructed our business enterprise model, a ?Global Group Leader? (GCL). A GCL shows high competitiveness by providing value-added goods globally in quite a few classes where high unmet healthcare desires exist plus a high degree of expertise is needed, and therefore requires a foremost position in this kind of ?classes?. With the very same time, we established our very important R&D classes including urology, immunology including transplantation and infectious diseases, neuroscience, diabetes mellitus complications and metabolic diseases, and oncology (4). OUR RESEARCH PLATFORM We strongly believe that we need to reinforce PS-341 kinase inhibitor our research capabilities by approaching new technologies and new research areas in a timely manner so that you can create ground breaking drugs (5).
In 2009, we started operation of an X-ray beam line at the Photon Factory of the Large Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Tsukuba, purposely built for efficient elucidation of protein structures for use by Astellas and academic institutions (6) (Fig. 1). We also created the Bioimaging Research Laboratories at our Tsukuba Research Center so as to enhance our capability in drug discovery and translational sciences (7) (Fig. 2). In addition, we are keen to strengthen our capability in other necessary technology platforms including proteomics (8) and bioinformatics (9,10). In view of treatment modality, Astellas had specialized primarily in small Ponatinib Bcr-Abl inhibitor kinase inhibitor molecules, including natural solutions. Therefore, we in-licensed VelocImmune technology from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., so as to efficiently generate fully human monoclonal antibodies (11) and acquired Agensys, Inc., to be able to strengthen our drug discovery of antibodies in cancer (12). OUR RESEARCH APPROACH Based on our in-house research and introduction from other companies from the past few years, our current oncology R&D programs consist of the following three approaches (13): (i) Precision medicine (ii) Mechanisms of action with application across multiple tumor types (iii) Leveraging Astellas? current capabilities in urology and other therapeutic area Within the past, we took the second and third approaches in our drug discovery.