Cambridge, UK and Tokyo, Japan, 10th October 2023 – PharmEnable Therapeutics, a UK drug discovery company, and Sosei Heptares (TSE: 4565), the international biopharmaceutical company, announce they have expanded their collaboration to apply their respective technologies to drive novel drug discovery for a second neurological disease target.
Sosei Heptares is known for its expertise in receptor protein structure determination, Structure-Based Drug Design (SBDD) and translational development. PharmEnable will apply its proprietary artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled medicinal chemistry platform (chemUNIVERSE) to design highly specific drug leads for further development.
Expanding their 2021 agreement, the companies will jointly conduct and share the costs of the discovery and the development programme and will co-own any resulting products equally. The companies are already exploiting their complementary capabilities in an ongoing collaboration focused on an initial target receptor, where they have identified promising small molecules with a new binding mode and novel chemotype.
Dr. Matt Barnes, President of Heptares Therapeutics and Head of UK R&D, commented: “Based on our experience working on our initial collaboration target, PharmEnable’s proprietary AI platform has demonstrated a level of success that supports us extending our collaboration. We look forward to applying our SBDD expertise along with PharmEnable’s novel chemistry to further identify high quality molecules.”
Dr Hannah Sore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of PharmEnable, commented: “We are excited to be expanding our partnership with Sosei Heptares to include an additional target. We have demonstrated the complementarity of our platform and Sosei Heptares’ structural insights while working on our first target and we look forward to continuing to work together and applying our technologies to develop life-changing medicines for neurological disease.”
Image Copyright: Dr Hannah Sore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of PharmEnable Therapeutics
