Aptanomics to validate drug targets for Boehringer Ingelheim

Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) and Aptanomics, a privately held biopharmaceutical company based in Lyon, France, are to collaborate on 'aptamer based' target validation and drug discovery.

Aptanomics will provide BI with a panel of its proprietary peptide aptamers and characterise the consequence of binding to therapeutic targets.

Peptide aptamers are used to interrogate the target for druggable sites and assign and prioritise the biological relevance of the newly revealed sites. The peptide aptamer is then seamlessly incorporated into a chemical library screen to identify small molecules that displace the peptide aptamer and mimic its activity. In this way the peptide aptamers are used to guide drug discovery and identify those small molecules that hit the most relevant druggable site on the target.

The company has successfully employed its proprietary approach to a number of in-house programmes in the oncology field and has two products in lead optimisation. The technology has broad applicability across many disease indications.

Dr Michel Pairet, senior vice-president of research at BI in Germany said: 'Aptanomics' technology may have the potential to complement our in-house target validation and drug discovery efforts. We look forward to evaluating the feasibility of the peptide aptamer approach and anticipate a valuable collaboration.'