PhoreMost Limited and C4X Discovery Holdings plc have signed a neurodegeneration drug discovery collaboration agreement. Combining the two companies’ technology platforms to validate novel targets, the initial focus will be on Parkinson’s disease.

Under the terms of the agreement, PhoreMost’s next-generation phenotypic screening platform, SITESEEKER^®, will be used to guide selection of novel targets identified by C4XD’s target identification platform, Taxonomy3^®, and provide chemical starting points to launch drug discovery programs. Initially SITESEEKER will enable the progression of several Parkinson’s disease targets to multi-target disease area partnering arrangements, or in-house C4XD drug discovery programs. 

Dr. Chris Torrance Chief Executive Officer of PhoreMost, said: “Neurodegeneration is a therapeutic area that has a pressing need for new and better targets. The opportunity to incorporate genetic insights gained from C4XD’s Taxonomy3^® data alongside our SITESEEKER screening platform has great potential to reveal highly relevant novel drug targets. We are tremendously excited by the complementarity of our technologies. C4XD’s Conformetrix approach is ideally suited to use the 3D biological shape information derived from SITESEEKER and convert this into small molecules starting points that will lead to the next generation of therapeutics.”

Dr. Clive Dix, Chief Executive Officer of C4XD, said: “As part of our strategy to become the world’s most productive drug discovery company, we continually assess cutting-edge technologies that add to our current capabilities in target identification and drug design. PhoreMost’s SITESEEKER is one such technology that has the potential to both validate targets and provide chemistry starting points for our molecular design platforms. This partnership complements C4XD’s existing target validation collaborations and enables us to accelerate our portfolio growth whilst decreasing timelines in drug discovery.”