TeraDiscoveries, Egenix partner to design new drugs for cancer and autism

Friday, February 28, 2014, 17:00 Hrs  [IST]

TeraDiscoveries, Inc., a company designs new drugs and drug candidates and accelerates the process of drug discovery by substituting new innovative cloud computing techniques, has entered into a strategic partnership with Egenix, Inc., a privately held New York based biotechnology firm. The two companies are working together to design new drugs that are effective against cancer and autism. TeraDiscoveries will use its Inverse Design software platform to design new drug molecules to effectively help Egenix accelerate its drug discovery and development process. Egenix is providing funding and target data that TeraDiscoveries will apply to identify and optimize inhibitors for certain cancer indications and autism. Egenix will develop the drugs through phase 2 while TeraDiscoveries retains a minority stake in the two drugs. Inverse Design runs computational models to quickly scan a vast chemical space to find the strongest inhibitors of a specific biological target, ones that also have good druggable properties and are predicted to have low toxic side effects. Inverse Design also has filters for many important drug properties including toxic side-effect risk assessment, off-target effects assessment, synthesizability, solubility, freedom to operate assessment. Specialized filtering can assess if a molecule crosses the blood-brain barrier. "Designing new drugs that bind to a specified protein target requires finding the best match among millions of molecules and peptides. Our approach executes the search much more efficiently and with greater accuracy than traditional methods,” says Ed Addison, CEO of TeraDiscoveries. “Outside reviewers have claimed that TeraDiscoveries saves over 75% of the time and cost of drug discovery, while providing novel, patentable composition of matter.” “They say genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger. We expect that our partnership with TeraDiscoveries will help create drugs that will stop the trigger from being pulled,” says Donald Fresne, Egenix’s CEO. “We believe TeraDiscoveries to have the best in silico drug discovery platform available. Plus, TeraDiscoveries has the unique ability to filter lead compounds that cross the blood-brain barrier, which is critical for our eIF4e autism inhibitor drug.” Companies can use Inverse Design as a service and run it via the Windows Azure cloud or a private cloud to design, discover, or optimize new small molecule or peptide drugs for their targets. TeraDiscoveries also partners and licenses assets in its pipeline which include compounds for many targets including Jak2, Jak3, hdac8, Aurora A, 11b-HSD1, hsp90, MAPK10, pfDHFR-Ts, ABL1, ABL3, ROCK1, TYK2, c-Kit, among others.