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Locus Enters into Drug Discovery Agreement with Ono Pharmaceutical
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Locus Pharmaceuticals, Inc. has announced that it has entered into a research agreement with Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.
Locus will apply its proprietary computational technologies, and capabilities in chemistry, biology and crystallography to design and develop IND-directed preclinical drug candidates for Ono. The molecular target is a protein kinase selected by Ono.
"We look forward to this multi-year collaboration with Ono, which allows us to apply and leverage all of our internal drug development capabilities as well as our kinase knowledge-base," said H. Joseph Reiser, Ph.D., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Locus.
"We have already demonstrated the power of our computational approaches and proprietary algorithms in our internal kinase programs and in other kinase-related collaborations, so we expect to bring significant value to Ono's efforts against this target."
"We have dedicated ourselves to creating innovative medicines that will be truly beneficial to patients," said Daikichi Fukushima, Ph.D., Executive Director of Research Headquarters, Ono.
"This collaboration with Locus, a world leader in computational drug discovery technologies, is a great chance for Ono to strengthen its drug discovery capabilities."
Starting with a protein crystal structure, an in silico collection of 40,000 molecular fragments and one of Linux-based supercomputer clusters, Locus identifies optimum ligand binding sites on protein targets, computes the binding affinity of molecular fragments to those sites and then links fragments with desirable chemical properties to computationally assemble virtual drug candidates.
The result is a 'virtual library' of drug candidates that exceeds the size and diversity of any physical screening library by orders of magnitude.
In addition, Locus can simulate physically realistic protein motions on very long-range timescales which can be used to validate the biological relevance of novel binding sites that may be uncovered by fragment mapping studies.
Because of the speed and accuracy with which these virtual libraries are constructed and evaluated, Locus typically needs to synthesize only hundreds of compounds to generate highly potent lead molecules.
