Isogenica, Biolauncher and Cresset Biomolecular Discovery forge alliance to bring powerful target-to-drugs platform to market

Joint venture aims to rapidly identify small molecule therapeutics to pharma targets

Isogenica Ltd today announced a collaborative joint venture with Biolauncher Ltd (Cambridge, UK) and Cresset Biomolecular Discovery Ltd (Welwyn Garden City, UK) to develop an innovative end-to-end therapeutic discovery platform. Under the terms of the collaboration the parties will integrate their expertise in peptide library design, evolutionary screening, next generation sequencing, state of the art structural analytics, and molecular field-based computational chemistry to identify active compounds against high-value therapeutic targets.

The new approach 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 unique 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 alliance illustrates how innovative companies are adapting to the changing pharmaceutical research and development business and the current equity funding gap. The collaboration has leveraged non-dilutive funding to integrate its proprietary approaches and solve the complex problem of how to discover small molecule leads against drug targets using a rapid and cost effective rational process. The partners will develop and provide access to the system through an open innovation framework rather than through more traditional equity structures.

Kevin Matthews, CEO, Isogenica commented of the collaboration: “We are excited by the potential to integrate cutting edge molecular biology with state of the art computational biology and chemistry tools to develop small molecule drugs against novel targets using the combined expertise of the businesses. The industry needs to leverage the significant investment in individual platform technologies to address the innovation gap and deliver shareholder value from therapeutic research and development.”

“A willingness to collaborate across the partners to deliver proof of concept developments has created a unique opportunity for us to link our world-leading technologies into a platform that can create significant value and opportunities for our underlying businesses,” said Rowan Gardner, Chairman, Biolauncher.

“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 will be exhibiting at the 2011 BIO International Convention in Washington D.C. between June 27th and 30th, at the UKTI stand booth number 1405.

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. www.isogenica.com

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. www.biolauncher.com

About Cresset Biomolecular Discovery Ltd
Cresset develops software for calculating and comparing the molecular Field characteristics of chemical compounds. Field technology uses the surface properties of molecules to evaluate their activities and properties, rather than relying on 2D structure similarity, which enables Cresset’s users to find more interesting, novel and relevant results than other methods. Cresset’s Fields provide a smarter, structure independent way of hit-finding, lead switching and lead optimization in drug discovery and other chemistry-based research projects. Cresset’s Field technologies have been successfully applied to a very wide range of target classes, with and without structural information, on over 100 projects for major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. www.cresset-group.com

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Kevin Matthews, CEO Isogenica - T: +44 (0)1799 533682 - E: kevin.matthews@isogenica.com

Rowan Gardner, Chairman, Biolauncher – T: +44 (0)1799 531635 – E: rowan@biolauncher.com

Rob Scoffin, CEO, Cresset BMD Ltd. – T: +44 (0)1707 356 120 – E: rob@cresset-group.com

This release was published on openPR.