PrecisionLife & Cyclica join forces on 30 AI drug discovery programmes

pharmafile | May 17, 2021 | News story | Sales and Marketing |  AI, drug discovery 

PrecisionLife, a combinatorial analytics company, and Toronto-based drug discovery company, Cyclica, have announced a strategic partnership to co-market and offer their computational platforms as an integrated “drug discovery factory”.

The companies will initially collaborate on up to 30 pharma and biotechnology drug discovery programmes over the next two years, utilising artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to streamline the process.

The agreement is pump-primed by 17 chronic diseases studies that PrecisionLife completed last year, which revealed patient stratifications and multiple novel druggable targets per disease. Cyclica also has a portfolio of several joint ventures across multiple therapeutic areas, with strategic relationships with multiple academic, biotech and pharma partners.

Naheed Kurji, President and CEO of Cyclica, said: “Finding the right target and understanding which patients will benefit is the critical challenge in modern drug discovery. Cyclica is building one of the largest and most diversified portfolios of drug discovery programmes across therapeutically rich and diverse areas.

“PrecisionLife’s detailed, innovative insights into the biology of complex diseases and which targets are relevant to which patient subgroups deliver a major advantage as we build the biotech pipeline of the future.”

PrecisionLife’s AI technology will be used to analyse patient datasets to identify disease mechanisms with novel druggable targets, patient stratification biomarkers, and chemical starting points.

Cyclica’s platform uses a proteome-wide lens to evaluate multiple novel and rare on- and off-target interactions simultaneously in a multi objective drug design approach.

Steve Gardner, CEO of PrecisionLife, said: “Cyclica’s high quality platform, team and business model is a key building block for our strategy to find novel therapeutic approaches for unmet medical needs. Together we are building a new pipeline based on world leading AI-driven biology and chemistry that will deliver new medicines to patients faster and more precisely across a wide variety of therapeutic areas.”

Kat Jenkins