Alphabet’s Calico and Terray Tx Announce Partnership to Tackle Age Related Disease
A partnership between Alphabet subsidiary Calico Life Sciences LLC and drug discovery biotech Terray Therapeutics was announced on October 12, 2022. Calico, the Californian life science company, will cooperate with Terray by using their tNova drug discovery platform to focus on age related disease.
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A press statement by both companies explains that Calico will be in charge of drug development and commercialisation, while Terray will “receive an upfront payment and [be] eligible to receive milestones as well as tiered royalties on net sales.” Jacob Berlin, Chief Executive Officer of Terray said: “We are thrilled to collaborate with Calico and look forward to applying our discovery engine to identify modulators of previously intractable disease targets.”
We are pleased to announce a new collaboration with @Terray_Tx focused on the discovery and development of novel small molecule therapeutics for diseases of #aging, including #cancer. To learn more: https://t.co/37ErlvbgGy pic.twitter.com/tAqtzOnseh
— Calico (@calico) October 12, 2022
tNova, Terray’s computational platform, utilises computational methods including AI and automation to identify small molecule leads for novel therapeutics. The large scale of their chemistry engine, and their combined wet-lab and in silico workflow have made Terray attractive collaborators for Calico’s projects. “Terray’s platform offers a new opportunity to more precisely assess the biochemical dynamics between disease targets and small molecules at a very large scale,” said Jonathan W. Lewis, Chief Business Officer at Calico.
Calico, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. (Google’s holding company), is focused on using drug discovery and lead finding methods to find therapies for age-related diseases. It is Calico’s hope that such interventions will “enable people to lead longer and healthier lives.” The company was founded in 2013 and has since garnered partnerships with biomedical giants like AbbVie and MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute.
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Alphabet has made other ventures into the computational drug discovery realm with their AI/ML-oriented subsidiary, DeepMind. In 2020, DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 came first in the computational protein folding competition, CASP 14. AlphaFold 2 hopes to use machine learning to predict the folding structures of proteins based on their amino acid sequence. Analysis by Data Bridge Market Research predicts the AI in drug discovery industry to grow at a CAGR of 53.3% from 2022 until 2029. They cite the rises in the incidence of chronic diseases as a market driver for the booming increase.
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