Sygnature Discovery, a global integrated drug discovery company and Daewoong Pharmaceutical, a global healthcare group, entered into a research collaboration agreement to accelerate the discovery of a novel small molecule to target autoimmune disease.

Sygnature Discovery will provide integrated drug discovery support using specialist fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) and virtual high throughput screening (vHTS) expertise from its medicinal chemistry, biology, and computational science teams. The company will also support protein science and crystallography to accelerate novel drug discovery for Daewoong’s project.

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.

Joon Seok Park, head of Daewoong’s discovery center, said, “Daewoong is actively pursuing open collaboration for various innovative platform technologies to advance global drug discovery. We believe the collaboration with Sygnature will set a new milestone in expanding Daewoong Pharmaceutical’s new drug pipeline.”

Simon Hirst, CEO of Sygnature Discovery, said, “We are delighted to be working with the talented team of scientists at Daewoong on this integrated drug discovery collaboration. Here at Sygnature, we have built an FBDD platform which combines a proprietary fragment collection with high throughput biophysical screening technologies to rapidly identify and characterize fragment hits.”

Hirst added, “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.”