Isogenica and Biolauncher, Cambridge
UK together with Cresset Group, Welwyn Garden City UK announce funding from the
Technology Strategy Board, the UK's innovation agency, for a £1M project to
develop a highly-scalable approach to small molecule drug discovery.
The funding enables the consortium
to develop an integrated platform to identify diverse small molecules active
against drug targets using very large peptide libraries to explore chemical
space. The consortia's objective is to demonstrate that this platform provides
a new scalable approach to the early stage drug discovery challenges that is
rapid, cost effective and applicable to intracellular, extracellular and
membrane bound drug targets.
The process will use Isogenica's
libraries to select a population of diverse binding peptides against a
biological target. These peptides will be analysed using novel structural
bioinformatics already developed by Biolauncher to identify their active
conformation. This three-dimensional template will be used to generate a field
based pharmacophore that Cresset will use to identify small molecule drug-like
medicinal chemistry starting points. Individually the component technologies
have been used in over 170 drug discovery projects to date.
"The diversity of the
chemical libraries in corporate collections can be quite limited and so the
percentage of chemical space represented is small. Isogenica's peptide
libraries are designed to be structurally very diverse and sample a much
greater volume of chemical space. Also, in addition to acting as a structural
template, there is a high probability of finding binding peptides which have
immediate utility as reagents for probing the target biology and supporting the
drug development process" commented Rowan Gardner, who is leading the
consortia's Business Development activity.
"By working with diverse populations
of binding peptides it is possible to determine which residues are contributing
to the binding and infer their active conformations. Coupling Isogenica's
massive screening libraries with Cresset's small molecule bioisostere discovery
tools offer the possibility to bridge biologics directly into small molecule
chemistry" added Kevin Mathews, CEO of Isogenica.
About Isogenica
Isogenica specialises in the discovery and
optimisation of therapeutic and diagnostic peptides, proteins and antibodies
using its proprietary technology, CIS display. Founded in 2000, Isogenica
has developed a unique capability in the field of protein engineering.
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.
About Cresset
Cresset was formed in 2002 using the basic
research of our founder Dr Andy Vinter to introduce a new virtual screening
technology. Over the last decade our technology has been widely adopted
throughout the drug discovery and agrochemical industries. At the same time our
product suite has grown to encompass desktop and enterprise level solutions.
Currently our customers include many of the top 20 pharamaceutical companies,
large and small biotechs across the USA, Europe and Japan, agrochemical
companies as well as top academics.
About Biolauncher
Biolauncher was founded as an advisory firm
based in Cambridge, UK specialising in providing services to grow life science
businesses. The company has leveraged its 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. The principals have a significant track record of raising
capital and developing platform technologies to enhance pharmaceutical research
and development.
About the
Technology Strategy Board
The Technology Strategy Board is the
UK's innovation agency and works to accelerate economic growth by stimulating
and supporting business-led innovation. Sponsored by the Department for
Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Technology Strategy Board brings
together business, research and the public sector, supporting and accelerating
the development of innovative products and services to meet market needs,
tackle major societal challenges and help build the future economy. For more
information please visit
www.innovateuk.org.
The grant for this project was awarded through the Technology Strategy Board's
£20m ‘Technology Inspired Innovation' competition for research and development
funding.
For
further information on the complete range of software and services available
from Cresset, please visit
www.cresset-group.com,
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