On November 12, 2020, Eli Lilly and Company and Seed Therapeutics, Inc. (a subsidiary of BeyondSpring, hereinafter referred to as " BeyondSpring Seed"), partner of StoneWise reported the company has reached a US $790 million cooperative development agreement for jointly using its new protein degradation technology platform to develop new drugs, and StoneWise AIDD platform promoted the agreement as an underlying technical support party with computational biology, virtual screening and rational design (Press release, Stonewise, NOV 12, 2020, View Source [SID1234654560]). Therefore, from the deal, it well demonstrates that StoneWise and BeyondSpring Seed are leading and innovating the technology in the field of protein degradation drug research and development.
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StoneWise and BeyondSpring Seed reached a cooperation in early 2020, making use of artificial intelligence + computational chemistry platform to provide compound screening and design in the drug development for BeyondSpring Seed. BeyondSpring Seed focuses on using "molecular glue" technology with independent IP and better drug-forming properties to identify and degrade pathogenic proteins that are not usually used as drug targets.
Applying in the new drug research and development practice supported by the world’s most cutting-edge technology platform, StoneWise has further showed its technology and team strength in the field of small molecule drug discovery that it has been focusing on. StoneWise has invested in the research of Molecular glue and PROTAC platform since the establishment of the company, accumulated abundant know-how and molecular generation and optimization related AI based methodology, and reached similar cooperative development agreements with several companies.
Small molecules induce protein degradation through E3, which can solve drug development problems with pathogenic proteins as targets that cannot be realized by active pocket "occupying" mode (It is known at present that 80% of human proteins cannot be developed as drugs through this way). Protein degradation targeting chimerism (PROTAC) technology has preliminarily proved the safety and effectiveness of drugs based on this pathway in clinical practice. It is known that there are more than 600 kinds of E3 ubiquitination systems existing in human body, but only CRBN、VHL、MDM2 and so on are the most commonly used E3 systems. In addition, in order to achieve the bidirectional chimerism of target protein and E3 ubiquitin ligase protein, the molecular weight of the active compounds obtained by rational design is large, and the subsequent development difficulty caused by drug formation problem is improving comparing with traditional small molecules. Therefore, the discovery and validation of novel effective E3 ubiquitination system and the discovery of small molecules with better drug-forming that can mediate protein degradation have attracted great attention in this newly emerging field.