UK-based biopharmaceutical company PhoreMost has entered into a multi-project target discovery collaboration with Roche, a global biotechnology company.
Under the terms of the agreement, PhoreMost will receive an upfront payment and will be eligible for preclinical success-based milestones.
PhoreMost will deploy its in-house expertise and next-generation phenotypic screening platform, SITESEEKER, toward disease-relevant pathways nominated by Roche.
Novel targets identified will be further validated and characterised by Roche's R&D organisation, while any SITESEEKER-based probes would become the starting point for drug discovery efforts across a set of disease pathways in immunology and haematology.
We are delighted that Roche has chosen to work with us to enhance its drug discovery pipeline to unlock the power of protein structure prediction for next generation drug design
Speaking about the collaboration, PhoreMost's CEO Dr Neil Torbett said: "This collaboration with Roche is testament to the power and versatility of SITESEEKER and further validates the potential and broad applications of the platform."
The SITESEEKER platform is based on PhoreMost's core proprietary Protein Interference technology. PhoreMost probes the entire proteome in a live cell environment for novel druggable targets linked to any chosen disease, using the vast 3D shape diversity of natural protein fragment libraries.
Dr Torbett continued: "We are delighted that Roche has chosen to work with us to enhance its drug discovery pipeline to identify novel targets and unlock the power of protein structure prediction for next generation drug design."