Cambridge, UK, 07 January 2020: PhoreMost Limited, the UK-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to drugging ‘undruggable’ disease targets, today announced it has entered into a multi-project drug discovery collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the world-leading pharmaceutical companies developing innovative therapies for diseases with unsatisfactory treatments. Under the terms of the agreement, PhoreMost will receive an upfront payment and research funding together with downstream success-based milestones. Further financial terms are not disclosed.

PhoreMost will deploy its in-house expertise and next-generation phenotypic screening platform, SITESEEKER^®, towards disease relevant pathways nominated by Boehringer Ingelheim. Novel targets identified will be further validated and characterised by Boehringer Ingelheim as part of its internal Discovery Research pipeline. Boehringer Ingelheim’s Research programme is active in the fields of immunology and respiratory diseases, cardiometabolic diseases, oncology research and immuno-oncology, as well as diseases of the central nervous system.

The SITESEEKER platform is based on PhoreMost’s core proprietary protein interference, or ‘PROTEINi’, technology. Using SITESEEKER, PhoreMost probes the entire proteome in a live cell environment for novel druggable targets linked to any chosen disease, using the vast 3-D shape diversity of natural protein fragment (sub-domain) libraries. This enables the systematic unmasking of cryptic druggable sites, directly linking them to useful therapeutic functions.

Dr Chris Torrance, CEO of PhoreMost, said: “We are delighted that Boehringer Ingelheim has chosen to work with PhoreMost to enhance its drug discovery pipeline with attractive biological starting points. The collaboration is further recognition of the ability of PROTEINi and SITESEEKER to identify novel targets, and we look forward to working with the Boehringer Ingelheim team on these projects.”