Sygnature Discovery And Daewoong Pharma Announce Drug Discovery Research Collaboration

Global integrated drug discovery company, Sygnature Discovery and global healthcare group Daewoong Pharmaceutical, have entered into a research collaboration agreement to accelerate the discovery of a novel small molecule to target autoimmune disease.

Sygnature Discovery will provide integrated drug discovery support using specialist fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) and virtual high throughput screening (vHTS) expertise from its medicinal chemistry, biology, and computational science teams. The company will also support protein science and crystallography to accelerate novel drug discovery for Daewoong’s project.

Sygnature Discovery has a market-leading track record in drug discovery including 22 compounds delivered into the clinic (Phases I to III) since 2011; 41 compounds into pre-clinical development, and over 170 patent applications with Sygnature Discovery scientists named as inventors.

Joon Seok Park, Head of Daewoong’s Discovery Centre, commented: “Daewoong is actively pursuing open collaboration for various innovative platform technologies to advance global drug discovery. We believe the collaboration with Sygnature will set a new milestone in expanding Daewoong Pharmaceutical’s new drug pipeline.”

Dr Simon Hirst, CEO of Sygnature Discovery, said: “We are delighted to be working with the talented team of scientists at Daewoong on this integrated drug discovery collaboration. Here at Sygnature, we have built an FBDD platform which combines a proprietary fragment collection with high throughput biophysical screening technologies to rapidly identify and characterise fragment hits.

“We look forward to applying this technology along with our specialist in silico-based virtual high-throughput screening (vHTS) techniques to identify high value hits and leads and accelerate the novel small molecule discovery process for Daewoong.”

Sygnature Discovery provides intellectual input and drug discovery expertise to accelerate target validation, hit identification, hit-to-lead, lead optimisation and drug discovery programmes. The company’s capabilities include medicinal chemistry, in vitro and in vivo biology, HTS, computational chemistry and informatics, DMPK, form and formulation and protein crystallography.

For more information, visit: www.sygnaturediscovery.com

About Sygnature Discovery
Sygnature Discovery is a world-leading integrated drug discovery partner, offering expertise across a broad range of therapeutic areas and biological target classes. Based in Nottingham and with facilities in Alderley Park, Tytherington and Glasgow, employing close to 700 people.

For more information, visit www.sygnaturediscovery.com.

About Five Arrows
Five Arrows is the alternative assets arm of Rothschild & Co and has €23B of AuM with offices in Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Luxembourg. With over €9B of assets under management, the corporate private equity business of Five Arrows is focused on investing in companies with highly defensible market positions; strong management teams; business models with high visibility of organic unit volume growth and strong unit economics; and multiple operational levers that can be used to unlock latent value. Sectors are limited to data and software, technology-enabled business services and healthcare.

For more information, visit https://www.rothschildandco.com/en/merchant-banking/corporate-private-equity/.

About Daewoong Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd:
Based on the vision of "global Healthcare Group that leads life quality improvement,” Daewoong Pharmaceutical develops excellent medicines and supplies them to the global market. It has established local subsidiaries, research institutes, and factories in eight countries around the world, including Indonesia, the United States, and China, with South Korea as the centre. Specifically, Daewoong operates biopharmaceutical research, development, and production bases in Indonesia. Recently, it has shown results of developing innovative new drugs and entering the global market in various fields such as GERD, diabetes, pulmonary fibrosis, and autoimmune diseases, leading the development of intractable disease treatments that are "First in class" and "Best in class.” For more information, visit https://m.daewoong.co.kr/en/main/index.