University of Sydney Enters New Drug Discovery AI Partnership with Pharos Tx
Pharos Therapeutics, the Australian arm of the South Korean drug development company Pharos iBio, has signed a partnership with The University of Sydney to use AI to identify drug candidates for cancer and rare disease to develop into drugs.
The agreement takes the form of a memorandum of understanding, a document that states common intent between two parties. Pharos co-CEO in Australia, Kyu-Tae Kim, said of the partnership: “We are thrilled to work together with the University and the Drug Discovery Initiative to utilise cutting-edge infrastructure for the acceleration of further drug discovery.”
In the agreement, Sydney University’s Drug Discovery Initiative will gain access to Chemiverse, a proprietary AI drug development platform from Pharos. In return, Pharos will work with the University’s drug discovery researchers and infrastructure.
“The process of developing drugs for treating disease is highly complex. We are incredibly excited to be working with Pharos Therapeutics, which will bring its cutting-edge artificial intelligence platform Chemiverse to this partnership.”
- Michael Kassiou, Director of the Drug Discovery Initiative.
Chemiverse is an extensive platform covering the drug development process from target discovery to lead generation. Based on data from over 35 million articles, the platform is currently being used for approximately ten R&D and commercialisation projects.
Chemiverse has already been used for the development of the phase Ib clinical candidate PHI-101-AML, which is being investigated as an acute myeloid leukaemia treatment. The therapeutic is a small molecule inhibitor of FLT3 and is being trialled in both Australian and Korean clinics.
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“This platform will greatly enhance our ability to develop novel treatments for unmet medical need. Additionally, the platform’s synergies with the Drug Discovery Initiative will boost our innovation and support new drug discovery pipelines,” added Kassiou.
Kassiou is also Director of The NSW Organoid Innovation Centre which use stem-cell organoids to assist in the acceleration of drug discovery. Back in March, the NSW (New South Wales) Government provided 2.5 million AUD to set up the centre.
Kassiou said: “The NSW Organoid Innovation Centre will turbocharge the biomedical ecosystem in NSW and establish a world-class stem-cell research and drug discovery hub for Australia.”
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