Isogenica
Ltd today announced a collaborative joint venture with Biolauncher Ltd
(Cambridge, UK) and Cresset Biomolecular Discovery Ltd (Welwyn Garden City, UK)
to develop an innovative end-to-end therapeutic discovery platform. Under the
terms of the collaboration the parties will integrate their expertise in
peptide library design, evolutionary screening, next generation sequencing,
state of the art structural analytics, and molecular field-based computational
chemistry to identify active compounds against high-value therapeutic
targets.
The
new approach harnesses the vast chemical and conformational diversity of very
large (10
14) peptide libraries to explore available chemical space
around a novel biological target. Enrichment of the peptide libraries
towards greater specificity for the target is driven by an advanced
computational biology system that is also used to identify the active
conformations of populations of binding peptides. These binding peptide
conformations can then be translated into a high quality field pharmacophore (a
drug template) and used to identify drug-like small molecules for
testing. This integrated set of technologies represents a unique platform
that can rapidly and cost effectively progress a drug target to structurally
diverse small molecule drug leads without recourse to high throughput
screening.
Elements
of the platform have been proven by the parties in collaboration with their own
customers. The approach has been shown to be compatible with both extracellular
and intracellular targets enabling a large proportion of the druggable genome
to be evaluated. The next step is to validate the joint venture's approach with
third party drug targets.
The
alliance illustrates how innovative companies are adapting to the changing
pharmaceutical research and development business and the current equity funding
gap. The collaboration has leveraged non-dilutive funding to integrate its
proprietary approaches and solve the complex problem of how to discover small
molecule leads against drug targets using a rapid and cost effective rational
process. The partners will develop and provide access to the system
through an open innovation framework rather than through more traditional
equity structures.
Kevin
Matthews, CEO, Isogenica commented of the collaboration: "We are excited by the
potential to integrate cutting edge molecular biology with state of the art
computational biology and chemistry tools to develop small molecule drugs
against novel targets using the combined expertise of the businesses. The
industry needs to leverage the significant investment in individual platform
technologies to address the innovation gap and deliver shareholder value from
therapeutic research and development."
"A
willingness to collaborate across the partners to deliver proof of concept
developments has created a unique opportunity for us to link our world-leading
technologies into a platform that can create significant value and
opportunities for our underlying businesses," said Rowan Gardner, Chairman,
Biolauncher.
"By
integrating Cresset's field-based computational chemistry into this platform we
will be able to apply our proven approach to more targets
and demonstrate how we can find diverse small molecule leads against a range of
pharmaceutically interesting new targets" said Rob Scoffin, CEO, Cresset
Biomolecular Discovery.
