Umbrella for platform providers

Former Perkin-Elmer Corp. president and COO Riccardo Pigliucci believes he has found one solution to the proliferation of small service-oriented toolkit companies that possess pieces of interesting technology but lack the critical mass to make it on their own.

Pigliucci is CEO of the newly formed Discovery Partners International, which aggregates combinatorial chemistry company Irori and ChemRx, a chemical libraries and lead-optimization company. The two companies, which will be independent entities within Discovery Partners, will form the basis of what Pigliucci hopes will become a family of companies that will provide multiple drug discovery services to pharma and biotech clients...