SAN DIEGO—Eidogen-Sertanty Inc., a computational drug discovery solutions provider, in mid-December announced a collaboration with fellow San Diego-based company, Kalypsys Inc., that is focused on the discovery of novel small molecules for anti-inflammatory indications.
Under the terms of the collaboration, Eidogen-Sertanty will employ its DirectDesign computational drug discovery platform to design a virtual library of novel, synthetically tractable and drug-like compounds with predicted activity against a target of interest to Kalypsys.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Dr. Steve Muskal, CEO of Eidogen-Sertanty, says the deal is "significant—what I would call a ramped-up milestone-driven collaboration."
The deal developed from an existing relationship between the two companies. Kalypsys has used Eidogen-Sertanty's target-based technologies and found them useful for its drug discovery efforts. Notably, Kalypsys was a customer of Eidogen-Sertanty's Target Informatics Platform.
Under the current deal, though, Kalypsys gets a bit more than just a single good piece of technology—it gets a full suite of technologies to help it discover potentially valuable novel compounds, Muskal says. Under the DirectDesign style of collaboration, which is used by other companies as well in partnership with Eidogen-Sertanty, all of the company's technologies are employed in the discovery effort with the collaborator.
In this collaboration, Eidogen-Sertanty is not only using a wide range of technologies but also two sets of constraints: ligand-focused constraints and target-directed constraints. The work started in December, and Muskal expected that the first molecules will be synthesized and purified as early as February and the first biological results as early as spring.
"Kalypsys can screen a large number of molecules very rapidly and they have a great chemistry synthesis group, so things will be able to move quickly," he adds. "The collaboration is set up to continue as we progress to various stages and could stretch out for the next year or so, though there is no way to predict exactly how long the work will run."
The key to achieving such speed is by throwing a suite of technologies at a problem to rapidly come up with small molecules in a cost-efficient manner, then using consensus strategies, Muskal says. "When one method you use suggests that you do something or go with a certain molecule, and then a another method using fundamentally different principles tells you the same thing, that helps increase your confidence that you are on the right track.
"And when you bring on a third and a fourth and a fifth method, each of which also uses different principles, and they point you in the same direction, you decrease your risk profile considerably. That's what it's about: speed and confidence. The driving principle behind this collaboration and all of our DirectDesign collaborations is that we want to get people to INDs in less than 18 months when they partner with us."
