Isogenica has announced a collaborative joint venture with Biolauncher and Cresset Biomolecular Discovery to develop an 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, structural analytics, and molecular-field-based computational chemistry to identify active compounds against high-value therapeutic targets.
The new approach harnesses the chemical and conformational diversity of very large (1014) 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 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 partners will develop and provide access to the system through an open innovation framework rather than through more traditional equity structures.
‘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,’ commented Kevin Matthews, CEO at Isogenica. ‘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.’
