PhoreMost Ltd., the UK-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to ‘Drugging the Undruggable®’ disease targets, today announced it has entered into a multi-project target discovery collaboration with Roche, one of the world's leading biotechnology companies. Under the terms of the agreement, PhoreMost will receive an upfront payment and is eligible for preclinical success-based milestones. Further financial terms are not disclosed.
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, and any SITESEEKER-based probes would become the starting point for drug discovery efforts across a set of disease pathways in immunology and haematology.
The SITESEEKER® platform is based on PhoreMost’s core proprietary ‘Protein Interference’ (PROTEINi®) technology. PhoreMost probes the entire proteome in a live cell environment for novel druggable targets linked to any chosen disease, using the vast 3-D shape diversity of natural protein fragment (sub-domain) libraries. SITESEEKER® systematically unmasks new and unanticipated druggable sites across the entire human proteome, directly linking them to useful therapeutic functions.
Dr Neil Torbett, CEO of PhoreMost, 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. We are delighted that Roche has chosen to work with us to enhance its drug discovery pipeline using PROTEINi and SITESEEKER to identify novel targets and unlock the power of protein structure prediction for next generation drug design.”