EMERYVILLE, Calif.—Amyris Inc., an industrial bioscience company, recently announced that just months after initiating a collaboration with one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, it has successfully achieved the first milestone under the agreement. This milestone. the company says, resulted in the creation of a robust, sensitive activity assay for an oncology target in a live yeast strain. This high-throughput assay enables screening for chemical diversity found in nature using Amyris’s proprietary µPharm platform, with the potential to provide previously inaccessible molecule targets.
The µPharm platform combines two powerful technologies that can significantly accelerate and reduce the cost of new drug discovery. The Amyris platform is “groundbreaking,” the company says, in its ability to design and scale molecules that are “becoming disruptive workhorses across several industries.”
This capability is unique, according to Amyris, allowing broad access to a significant variety of naturally evolved molecules in a rapid, high-throughput format. Active molecules can be scaled for production in yeast, further tested and developed into market-ready pharmaceuticals at a cost and speed that the company believes has not been realized before in the pharmaceutical industry.
“We’re excited by how quickly we’ve achieved initial success in this project for one of the largest and most innovative companies in the sector,” said John Melo, Amyris' president and CEO. “We believe our technology platform is well suited to efficiently drive advancements in drug discovery while meeting our partners’ unique requirements and helping to save lives. Our demonstrated capabilities have led to signing several partnership agreements with leading global pharmaceutical companies this year. We are achieving in months what these companies have been chasing for years.”
Continued Melo, “Along with more than doubling our revenue this year, we are accelerating time to market for our biopharma partners. Our work to replace mammalian cells, deliver better antibiotics and discover new oncology treatments has the potential to transform drug discovery and make more available leading treatments to improve the lives of patients throughout the world.”
Amyris is an integrated renewable products company that is “enabling the world’s leading brands to achieve sustainable growth,” according to the company.
Amyris applies its innovative bioscience solutions to convert plant sugars into hydrocarbon molecules and produce specialty ingredients and consumer products. The company reports that is delivering its No Compromise products across a number of markets, including specialty and performance chemicals, flavors and fragrances, cosmetics ingredients and pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals.
