Elix and the Graduate School of Life Sciences at Tohoku University signed a joint research agreement seeking to advance drug discovery using AI technologies.
Elix’s business model comprises two key pillars: providing pharmaceutical companies with its integrated AI drug discovery platform Elix Discovery and advancing collaborative drug discovery with strategic partners using Elix’s latest AI technology and expertise.
The main offering from Elix Discovery is an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) that can automatically construct predictive models for optimal compound profiles. Shinya Yuki, CEO of Elix, commented that the interface features diverse structure generation functions with a strength in proposing structures that humans would not conceive.
Combining curated structure generation models with predictive models and parameters constructed on the GUI enables researchers to quickly optimise molecular design for both ligand-based drug design (LBDD) and structure-based drug design (SBDD).
Meanwhile, the Graduate School of Life Sciences at Tohoku University focuses on the development of novel approaches for small-molecule drug discovery and chemical biology. The key focus of the lab is on small molecular PROTACs that trigger the degradation of intracellular target proteins. The efforts aim to propose new drug discovery against “undruggable” proteins.
The joint collaboration between Elix and Tohoku University will be spearheaded by Minoru Ishikawa, a leading expert in TPD, who will lead the research group. By combining Elix’s solid background in compound profile prediction and molecular generation AI with Ishikawa’s expertise and technology, the partners plan to curate compounds that act on targets vital to cellular homeostasis.
Ishikawa explained that the benefits of the compounds generated through this partnership are two-fold: they should provide valuable insights into biological functions and widen possibilities for next-generation therapies.
