Daewoong Pharmaceutical has entered a research collaboration with Sygnature Discovery to expand its global open innovation for novel drug development.

On the 18th April, Daewoong Pharmaceutical (CEO Seng-ho Jeon and Lee Chang-jae) has announced a research collaboration with Sygnature Discovery (CEO Simon Hirst), a global integrated drug discovery company, to discover a novel small molecule to target autoimmune diseases.

Sygnature Discovery will provide its proprietary Fragment-Based Drug Discovery (FBDD) and virtual high throughput screening (vHTS) to accelerate Daewoong's novel drug discovery for autoimmune diseases. Additionally, Daewoong will receive support in protein science and crystallography to validate and secure mechanism of action. Through this collaboration, Daewoong Pharmaceutical expects to broaden its drug discovery scope to the field of protein-protein interaction (PPI) as a part of next-generation drug discovery strategy.

Sygnature Discovery is an integrated drug discovery company established in 2004 to support early drug development and clinical trials. Based in Nottingham, United Kingdom, the company provides intellectual input and drug discovery expertise to accelerate target validation, hit identification, hit-to-lead, lead optimisation and drug discovery programmes. The company's capabilities include medicinal chemistry, in vitro and in vivo biology, HTS, computational chemistry and informatics, DMPK, form and formulation and protein crystallography. Sygnature Discovery has a market-leading track record in drug discovery including 22 compounds delivered into the clinic (Phases I to III) since 2011, 41 compounds into pre-clinical development and over 170 patent applications with Sygnature Discovery scientists named as inventors.

Simon Hirst, CEO of Sygnature Discovery, commented that "We are delighted to be working with the talented team of scientists at Daewoong Pharmaceutical on this integrated drug discovery collaboration" and added that "Sygnature has built an FBDD platform which combines proprietary fragment collections with high-throughput biophysical screening technologies to rapidly identify and characterize fragment hits. We look forward to applying this technology along with our specialist in silico-based virtual high-throughput screening (vHTS) techniques to identify high value hits and leads and accelerate the novel small molecule discovery process for Daewoong."

Park Joon-seok, head of Daewoong's drug discovery center commented that "We are actively pursuing open collaborations on various innovative platform technologies to boost global new drug discovery. We believe the collaboration with Sygnature Discovery will set a new milestone in expanding Daewoong Pharmaceutical's new drug pipeline."

[Clarification1] Fragment-Based Drug Discovery, FBDD

As the latest process of new drug development, it is a method of finding a lead substance using a fragment compound (molecular weight less than 200) A fragment compound with high binding ability to the target of a new drug is first selected, and the binding position of the fragment compound is confirmed through protein structure crystallography before the compound is constructed using medicinal chemistry and precursors can be found through structural chemistry to secure both patentability and novelty.

[Clarification2] Virtual Screening, VS

Virtual search is a computer-assisted technology used in discovering new drugs. Using a computer library containing information on the structure of various compounds, it is possible to identify substances that are most likely to bind to drug targets. It is a technology that can accelerate the development of new drugs by securing various predictive data on drug similarity, binding force, binding state, etc. for the possibility of millions of compounds in a short time as much as it utilizes computers.

[Clarification3] vHTS

Instead of many HTS evaluations performed to confirm the effectiveness of new drug candidates, it obtains efficacy prediction results for virtually hundreds of millions of compounds by introducing various calculation formulas and existing results for the effectiveness of compounds. As it is predictive technology, it is necessary to check the actual results, but it is being used to accelerate the development of new drugs by culling hundreds of millions of compounds to the level of 100 to 1000.