(Sharecast News) - E-therapeutics has met two key milestones in its collaboration with small-molecule medicines specialist Galapagos, it announced on Friday.
The AIM-traded firm said that in line with its collaboration announced on 10 June, it had met pre-defined operational and success-based milestones, resulting in two payments from Galapagos.
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the board confirmed that the collaboration had remained on schedule.
E-therapeutics said its proprietary, disease-agnostic computational platform centred around network biology enabled in-silico testing of millions of therapeutic hypotheses.
It explained that, using its 'network-driven drug discovery' (NDD) platform and knowledge, it had identified hit compounds against a specific biological process of interest to Galapagos involved in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), and potentially in other fibrotic indications.
Further to the initial computational phase of the project, experimental testing of the computationally-predicted compound set was carried out in several relevant assays, and yielded a hit rate "orders of magnitude" higher than industry standards for early phenotypic drug discovery.
The companies would now work to characterise those hits further.
Under the terms of its agreement with Galapagos, E-therapeutics said it was eligible to receive additional milestone payments through pre-clinical and clinical development, as well as commercial milestones.
The company said it also remained free to explore partnering opportunities in all other areas of biology relating to IPF and fibrosis.
"E-therapeutics' ability to model human disease processes effectively in silico addresses critical limitations of the drug discovery process," said chief executive officer Ali Mortazavi.
"Our deeper understanding of underlying disease biology and ability to test millions of possible therapeutic interventions computationally ahead of experimental validation have the potential to mitigate late-stage, costly failures in drug development.
"The progress made to date in our collaboration with Galapagos to discover novel therapeutics in IPF and fibrosis is yet another validation of our technology platform, which can be applied to any therapeutic area."
At 0959 BST, shares in E-therapeutics were up 6.09% at 20.9p.
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