Oxford Drug Design, a biotechnology company with core expertise in computer-aided drug design, has announced that it has been engaged by PhoreMost Ltd (PhoreMost), a UK-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to ‘Drugging the Undruggable®’ disease targets, to accelerate a targeted protein degradation discovery programme for novel cancer therapeutics.
The project leverages Oxford Drug Design’s proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) computational platform consisting of multiple computational drug discovery capabilities for both ligand- and structure-based design, together with PhoreMost’s next-generation SITESEEKER® phenotypic screening platform and PROTEINi® libraries. In doing so, Oxford Drug Design has analysed the structural biology data and known binding compounds to identify and advance the development of novel, drug-like, compounds for onward optimization.
Dr Paul Finn, CSO of Oxford Drug Design commented: “We’re delighted to start deploying our pioneering computational platform and help other companies accelerate their own drug discovery efforts and we’re excited to have collaborated with PhoreMost on this project. Oxford Drug Design’s pioneering AI drug discovery platform has been well placed to make an impact on this challenging target.”
Dr Richard Boyce, VP Drug Discovery at PhoreMost added: “PhoreMost’s involvement in this project demonstrates the versatility of our SITESEEKER phenotypic screening platform and the potential of our PROTEINi libraries. Oxford Drug Design’s pioneering AI drug discovery platform has facilitated the rapid discovery of small-molecule drugs to newly identified druggable targets obtained from SITESEEKER.”
The global AI drug discovery market is estimated to be worth $5 billion by 2027, according to a recent report by MarketsandMarkets. With traditional drug discovery being a costly and lengthy process, the highly distinctive AI and machine learning technologies developed by Oxford Drug Design offers the prospect of analysing vast datasets and developing viable drugs in an automated and more cost-efficient way.
