Alivexis, Inc. (Headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; CEO S. Roy Kimura) is pleased to announce that the Company has entered into a Research Collaboration Agreement with Astellas Pharma Inc. (“Astellas”) to identify small molecule compounds for a new drug target selected by Astellas, utilizing Alivexis’ drug discovery platform ModBind™ and other technologies.

The collaboration aims to utilize Alivexis’ computational drug discovery platform, including ModBind™, to discover new small molecule compounds which will regulate the function of a novel drug target molecule selected by Astellas. As this target has no reported functional modulators to-date, the collaboration will accelerate the drug discovery of novel therapeutics against the target. In addition to in silico evaluation using the computational drug discovery platform, Alivexis will be responsible for integrated drug discovery research, including the development of experimental assays and compound evaluation using those assays. Under the terms of the collaboration, Astellas will have 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 more than 100 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】
“I am excited to announce the signing of our drug discovery collaboration with Astellas focused on the use of our proprietary and ground-breaking ModBind™ simulation technology to accelerate early drug discovery for a particular disease target. Through our collaboration, we look forward to gaining further validation of our technology while contributing to the discovery of novel clinical candidate compounds for diseases with high patient need.”

Alivexis with Astellas Pharma Inc. to Collaborate on Novel Drug Target(PDF)