From Targets to Drugs

The human genome project and the development of technologies to enable large scale interrogation of disease have massively increased the number of putative drug targets.  However this wealth of new targets has so far failed to herald an era of increased productivity in drug discovery and development.

The validation of novel targets as druggable and disease modifying is non-trivial as is the bridge from prospective target to active drug chemistry.  At Biolauncher we were keen to develop a novel platform that would support a rapid, scalable and cost effective approach to validating targets and bridging to diverse, patentable, active chemistry.

Biolauncher secured a Grant for R&D from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) to develop an informatics based approach that supports the identification of small molecule active chemistry from known populations of peptide binders.

The TSB development funding has led to a collaboration between Isogenica, Biolauncher and Cresset Group. Read the announcement here.

Biolauncher has developed a suite of analytical and algorithmic approaches that exploit the integration of next generation sequencing (NGS) with Isogenica’s CIS display platform.  Biolauncher’s tools deliver the following functionality

• Guided enrichment – working with the NGS outputs of the CIS platform to identify the optimal population of binding peptides within four cycles of the Isogenica system.
• Clustering the optimal binding peptides to gain insights into the available binding modes using a proprietary set of field based substitution matrices.
• Using a novel algorithmic approach to calculate the active conformation of the peptide in Field space.
• Creating a Field based pharmacophore – which can be used to find known and novel chemistry for screening and validation.

The integrated Isogenica, Biolauncher and Cresset platform can rapidly generate a series of functional reagents that can be used to validate the target as well as the lead.  Furthermore the Cresset Field Chemistry platform has been proven to find diverse active chemistry which strengthens and informs the patent protection.

Schematic overview of the integrated platform.

The collaboration aims to be able to find active chemistry against a drug target in under six months. The collaboration is actively seeking projects to validate the approach.  Please contact Rowan Gardner to find out more. To find out more about Isogenica’s CIS display platform and Cresset’s Field chemistry click the links to visit their websites.