Drug Discovery Collaboration for Novel Oncology Target

PhoreMost (Cambridge, UK) and Ligand’s subsidiary Vernalis (San Diego) have signed a joint research agreement on an undisclosed novel oncology target that was identified by the UK company’s SITESEEKER® phenotypic screening technology.

Ligand will now apply its Vernalis Design Platform (VDP) to design small molecule inhibitors against the target, to help rapidly progress compounds through hit-to-lead and lead optimisation stages. The objective of the collaboration is to out-license the resulting compounds for further development. Under the terms of the agreement, Vernalis and PhoreMost will share downstream revenues of any future out-licenses. Based on Ligand’s contribution and stage of development at the time of licensing, Ligand will be entitled to a scaling interest in license economics based on development stage.

“This collaboration with PhoreMost on a novel oncology target has the potential to generate highly valuable new drug candidates. This is another demonstration of the successful integration of Vernalis since its acquisition by Ligand in October of last year,” said John Higgins, Chief Executive Officer of Ligand.

“We are excited to be joining forces with Vernalis, whose impressive track record of developing first-in-class drugs is highly complementary to our core SITESEEKER platform (which) systematically opens up new druggable space across the entire human proteome, rapidly identifying sites in specific disease driving targets that can’t be readily seen using conventional methods,” said Chris Torrance, Chief Executive Officer of PhoreMost.