Aptanomics and Nanosyn collaborate on new cancer drugs

Aptanomics, a French-based specialist in the application of innovative protein technologies for drug discovery, is to collaborate with US company Nanosyn to discover new drugs in the field of oncology.

Under the agreement, Aptanomics will use its proprietary peptide aptamer technology to screen Nanosyn's small organic compound libraries.

Peptide aptamers are a new class of combinatorial protein reagents that guide the drug discovery effort towards druggable sites on therapeutic targets. Once initial hits are identified, Nanosyn will use its proprietary Chemistry on Demand platform to rapidly provide Aptanomics with highly focused arrays of small molecules and further medicinal chemistry services.

Aptanomics' technology provides a powerful new method to discover small molecule drugs against important pharmacological targets. High affinity peptide aptamers can be selected that block defined protein interactions in regulatory pathways which are affected in pathological conditions such as cancer. Peptide aptamers can then be employed in specific assays to screen collections of small molecule organic compounds for inhibitors of key protein interactions. Moreover, computer-assisted models of the target-aptamer complex can guide the design of focused chemical sets for further screening to identify potent drug candidates.

'We strongly believe that successful drug candidates emerge only through the fusion of good chemistry and good biology,' said Dr Olga Issakova, Nanosyn vice president. 'We believe that Aptanomics' peptide aptamer technology will identify new druggable sites and that the AptaScreen platform will successfully identify hits to those new sites.'