On September 2, 2025 Alivexis, Inc. (Headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; CEO S. Roy Kimura) reported they have received a notice from Astellas Pharma Inc. ("Astellas") to exercise the option right granted under a Research Collaboration Agreement, executed on June 17th 2024 (Press release, Alivexis, SEP 2, 2025, View Source [SID1234655631]). This agreement focused on identifying small molecule compounds targeting a new drug target selected by Astellas, utilizing Alivexis’ drug discovery platform ModBind and other advanced technologies.
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The joint research collaboration aimed to accelerate the discovery of novel functional modulators for a previously uncharacterized drug target selected by Astellas. Leveraging our computational drug discovery platform, including ModBind, the Alivexis team led the integrated drug discovery researching, including conducting in silico evaluations and developing experimental assays to evaluate compound efficacy. Under the terms of the collaboration agreement, Astellas was granted the option to acquire rights to the research deliverables.
About ModBind.
Alivexis has established a computational drug discovery platform that greatly accelerates small molecule drug discovery, which includes physics-based molecular dynamics simulations using GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), large-scale virtual screening algorithms, and deep learning models. With the help of their computational drug discovery platform, Alivexis has already delivered several clinical candidate molecules for both in-house drug discovery projects and external collaborations. Among Alivexis’ various computational drug discovery tools, the newly developed ModBind is a molecular simulations-based algorithm that can predict the efficacy of drug candidate compounds with high accuracy, yet performs hundreds to thousands of times faster than the other state-of-the-art technologies in the field. ModBind is based on a theoretical approach that is fundamentally different from industry standard simulations-based prediction technologies. One significant advantage of ModBind is that it is an absolute predictor of ligand efficacy and does not require known reference compounds, which are usually necessary for other methodologies. Therefore, ModBind is useful in all stages of preclinical drug discovery – from screening large random chemical libraries for initial hit finding to delivering clinical candidates in the lead-optimization stage. This capability has already been proven by Alivexis’ in-house research and external collaborations and is contributing to the progression of many drug discovery projects.
【CEO S. Roy Kimura’s Comments】
"We are extremely pleased that Astellas Pharma has elected to exercise its option to obtain the rights for the small molecule compounds that were discovered through our ModBind drug discovery collaboration. Despite being a difficult target with no previously reported lead compounds, our ModBind simulation technology has successfully identified compounds worth further study. This result further demonstrates the power of our ModBind platform to rapidly identify promising drug lead compounds. Beyond identifying new drug candidates for other promising disease targets, we are currently applying ModBind to develop a foundation AI model for drug discovery and generate very large synthetic datasets to train target-specific generative AI models. We believe that the combination of simulation and AI (ModBindxAI) is the key to unlocking efficient drug discovery. "