On September 9, 2021 PAQ Therapeutics ("PAQ"), a biotechnology company harnessing the power of autophagy to restore health and cure disease, and Insilico Medicine ("Insilico"), an end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, reported that the companies have entered into a collaboration agreement to develop small molecule therapies designed to hijack the autophagy pathway to address novel disease targets (Press release, PAQ Therapeutics, SEP 9, 2021, View Source [SID1234649950]).
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Under the terms of the agreement, both parties will leverage Insilico’s small molecule compound generation platform Chemistry42 and other AI-powered drug discovery technologies in combination with PAQ’s autophagosome-tethering compound (ATTEC) technology platform to discover novel small molecules with the potential to catalyze and selectively enhance the degradation of disease-causing entities through autophagy.
Autophagy is the natural cellular degradation mechanism that removes unnecessary or dysfunctional components through a lysosome-dependent mechanism. With its powerful ATTEC technology platform, PAQ expands the therapeutic potential of autophagy to target not only disease-causing proteins, but also lipids, pathogens, and other substrates with the goal of restoring health. Insilico’s AI-powered drug discovery platforms utilize deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers, and other modern machine learning techniques to speed the generation of new molecular structures with specific properties, improving the efficiency and success of drug discovery.
"PAQ’s autophagy-dependent approach supports a pivotal moment in the evolution of drug discovery and design by expanding the ability to target the disease-causing substrates underlying diseases with limited or no treatment options," said Feng Ren, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Drug R&D at Insilico. "Insilico is pleased to partner with PAQ Therapeutics to leverage our AI-driven drug discovery platforms in advancing drug R&D of ATTECs to address unmet medical needs."
"As part of PAQ’s ongoing efforts to therapeutically harness autophagy-dependent degradation, one key next step is to integrate cutting-edge technologies like AI that support our overall hit-finding and drug discovery strategy," said Nan Ji, Ph.D., Co-founder, President and CEO, PAQ Therapeutics. "We are excited to leverage Insilico’s deep expertise and proven track record in AI-driven drug discovery during a pivotal time in our company’s growth and progress."