PrecisionLife, a combinatorial analytics company, and Cyclica have entered into a partnership to co-market and offer complementary computational platforms as an integrated drug discovery factory. The companies will initially collaborate on up to 30 pharma and biotechnology drug discovery programs in the next two years.
Together, the two companies plan to advance a number of AI enhanced drug discovery programs and build an industry pipeline of partnered R&D opportunities. The agreement is underpinned by 17 chronic disease studies PrecisionLife completed last year, which revealed detailed patient stratifications and multiple novel druggable targets per disease, and the company’s existing strategic relationships with multiple academic, biotech and pharma partners. The companies also each have multiple ongoing commercial partnering discussions.
PrecisionLife claims its platform is proven to generate insights from patient datasets, identifying multiple disease mechanisms, with novel druggable targets, patient stratification biomarkers and chemical starting points, especially around unmet medical needs in chronic diseases. Cyclica’s platform uses a proteome-wide lens to evaluate multiple novel and rare on- and off-target interactions simultaneously. Cyclica’s multi objective drug design approach and lead optimisation cycles enable molecules to be designed, synthesised and tested in a few weeks, the company says.
“Finding the right target and understanding which patients will benefit is the critical challenge in modern drug discovery.” said Naheed Kurji, President and CEO of Cyclica. “Cyclica is building one of the largest and most diversified portfolios of drug discovery programs across therapeutically rich and diverse areas. PrecisionLife’s detailed, innovative insights into the biology of complex diseases and which targets are relevant to which patient subgroups deliver a major advantage as we build the biotech pipeline of the future.”
“Cyclica’s high quality platform, team and business model is a key building block for our strategy to find novel therapeutic approaches for unmet medical needs.” said Steve Gardner, CEO of PrecisionLife. “Together we are building a new pipeline based on world leading AI-driven biology and chemistry that will deliver new medicines to patients faster and more precisely across a wide variety of therapeutic areas.”
