Tuesday, June 25, 2019
C4X Discovery Holdings plc (AIM: C4XD), a pioneering drug discovery company, today entered into a collaboration with PhoreMost, a UK-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to drugging ‘undruggable’ disease targets. The collaboration, focused initially in Parkinson’s Disease, will combine both company’s technology platforms.
The addition of PhoreMost’s SITESEEKER® screening platform will bolster the C4XD drug discovery pipeline by validating novel targets already identified by C4XD’s proprietary target identification platform, Taxonomy3®, and provide chemical starting points to launch drug discovery programmes.
Clive Dix, Chief Executive Officer of C4XD, said: “As part of our strategy to become the world’s most productive drug discovery company, we continually assess cutting edge technologies that add to our current capabilities in target identification and drug design. PhoreMost has one such technology with the potential to both validate targets and provide chemistry starting points for our molecular design platforms. This partnership complements C4XD’s existing target validation collaborations and enables us to accelerate our portfolio growth whilst decreasing the timelines in drug discovery.”
SITESEEKER®’s phenotypic validation of Taxonomy3® derived novel targets will enable C4XD to progress several Parkinson’s Disease targets to multi-target disease area partnering arrangements, or in-house drug discovery programmes. C4XD’s proprietary drug discovery Conformetrix technology, which allows the dynamic 3D shapes of free drug molecules to be precisely measured from experimental data, can exploit the rich information produced by SITESEEKER® to produce commercially attractive small molecule drugs. The complementary nature of these technology platforms provides the potential to extend the collaboration to additional indications in the future.
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.
Parkinson’s Disease is a progressive neurological disease with more than an estimated 10 million people worldwide living with the disease. The total cost of Parkinson’s Disease in the US is c.$52 billion per year, more than double previous estimates.
