Sygnature Chemical Services, a leading provider of medicinal chemistry and computational chemistry services to the global pharmaceutical industry, has been awarded a £390,000 Grant for Business Investment (GBI) award by the East Midlands Development Agency (emda) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Founded in 2004, Sygnature serves clients all over the world. The business has a team of 32 industry-experienced chemists based at its start-of-the-art facilities in BioCity Nottingham, one of Europe’s largest biosciences incubators.

GBI is a discretionary scheme that provides a capital grant to businesses based in England to support sustainable investment. Its aim is to help businesses expand, rationalise, modernise or diversify.

Dr Simon Hirst, chief executive officer of Sygnature Chemical Services, commented: “We are very pleased to have been awarded this substantial grant by emda. This will be critical to Sygnature as we start construction of another new laboratory to house the additional experienced medicinal chemists that we are currently recruiting. Our phased expansion within BioCity Nottingham continues and, over the next three years, we will transform Sygnature into a fully-integrated drug discovery organisation. The GBI will enable and accelerate this expansion programme and facilitate a greater level of investment into drug discovery technologies, such as high content screening and flow chemistry.”

John O’Reilly, emda’s business support director, said: “The GBI award which we have given to Sygnature is helping it to continue its development as a high calibre science business, by enabling it to both invest in the cutting-edge laboratory equipment that it needs to gain a competitive advantage and to help it to expand its operation at BioCity. I wish Sygnature further success in the future as it continues its impressive growth.”

He added, “The GBI is already helping many regional businesses to develop and grow, but I am sure that there are many others that could potentially benefit from it. I would strongly urge other businesses in the region to see if they are eligible to apply for GBI.”

In May this year, emda announced that it would be providing an additional £9.5 million to the GBI scheme, with the ERDF contributing a further £1.4 million. The funding will be made available to support businesses up until 2014.

The criteria for GBI relate to location, need, the size and type of the business, the nature and size of the investment, viability, and the quality of the project.

For full details about GBI, visit emda’s website, where initial application forms are also available to download.