Isogenica, Biolauncher and Cresset BD forge alliance
The joint venture aims to rapidly identify small molecule therapeutics to pharma targets
UK-based Isogenica is to collaborate in a joint venture with Biolauncher (Cambridge, UK) and Cresset Biomolecular Discovery (Welwyn Garden City, UK) to develop a new end-to-end therapeutic discovery platform. All 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 companies aim to harnesses the vast 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.
‘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.
Isogenica's CIS display technology is an in vitro display technology that allows the rapid generation of polypeptide and antibody libraries from which it is possible to select lead molecules with high affinity and specificity for most targets.
BioLauncher has expertise in accessing non-dilutive funding to develop proprietary novel informatics and analytics systems to enable the use of information to drive efficiency in life science R&D. Cresset develops software for calculating and comparing the molecular Field characteristics of chemical compounds.
