Evotec AG announced that a compound identified and optimized in research collaboration with Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. has been nominated to enter pre-clinical development, leading to the payment of an agreed milestone. This collaboration project was initiated in March 2008. Evotec combined high throughput screening and its proprietary fragment-based drug discovery platform to identify novel compounds active against a protease target, which were then further optimized with Ono to generate a candidate suitable for pre-clinical development.