UK-based PhoreMost has announced that it has entered into a multi-project collaboration with Otsuka Pharmaceutical, a company dedicated to the research and development of highly-innovative drugs and diagnostics.

PhoreMost, the biopharmaceutical company dedicated to drugging “undruggable” disease targets, has however not disclosed any of the financial details of the agreement.

The organisation has detailed plans to deploy its in-house expertise and next-generation phenotypic screening platform, dubbed “Siteseeker”, towards disease relevant pathways nominated by Otsuka.

As an aspect of the agreement, novel targets identified will be further validated and characterised by Otsuka as part of its internal development pipeline, with an initial focus on gene therapy applications of identified targets.

This collaboration with Otsuka is “further recognition of the power of the Siteseeker approach to drive the identification of novel, druggable targets”, commented Dr Chris Torrance, chief executive officer of PhoreMost.

He continued, “We are particularly excited to be exploring not only small molecule therapeutics but also gene therapy applications of our platform.”

Last year the company announced a neurodegeneration focused drug discovery collaboration, aiming to initially accelerate C4X Discovery’s Parkinson’s disease drug discovery pipeline.

The collaboration was set to bolster the C4XD drug discovery pipeline of novel neurodegeneration drug targets, by using Siteseeker to enable the progression of several Parkinson’s disease targets to multi-target disease area partnering arrangements, or in-house C4XD drug discovery programmes.

The Siteseeker platform works by exploiting protein shape diversity to find functionally active peptides, significantly enhancing the power of phenotypic screening and translation into therapeutic modalities.