PhoreMost and C4X Discovery have announced a neurodegeneration focused drug discovery collaboration, aiming to initially accelerate C4X Discovery’s Parkinson’s disease drug discovery pipeline.
Under the terms of the agreement, PhoreMost’s next-generation phenotypic screening platform, Siteseeker, will be used to guide selection of novel targets identified by C4XD’s proprietary target identification platform, Taxonomy3, and provide chemical starting points to launch drug discovery programmes.
The companes announced that the aim of the collaboration is to bolster the C4XD drug discovery pipeline of novel neurodegeneration drug targets. Initially Siteseeker will enable the progression of several Parkinson’s disease targets to multi-target disease area partnering arrangements, or in-house C4XD drug discovery programmes.
“Neurodegeneration is a therapeutic area that has a pressing need for new and better targets,” explained Dr Chris Torrance, CEO of PhoreMost.
He continued, “The opportunity to incorporate genetic insights gained from C4XD’s Taxonomy3 data alongside our Siteseeker screening platform has great potential to reveal highly relevant novel drug targets. We are tremendously excited by the complementarity of our technologies.
“C4XD’s Conformetrix approach is ideally suited to use the 3D biological shape information derived from Siteseeker and convert this into small molecules starting points that will lead to the next generation of therapeutics.”
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurological disease with more than an estimated 10 million people worldwide living with the disease.
While the terms of the agreement are not disclosed, it is expected that both companies would share any revenues on validated targets produced by the collaboration.
