Sygnature Discovery and Daewoong Pharma announce research collaboration

Sygnature Discovery is pleased to have entered into a research collaboration agreement with the global healthcare group Daewoong Pharmaceutical 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.

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. Our capabilities include medicinal chemistry, in vitro and in vivo biology, HTS, computational chemistry and informatics, DMPK, form and formulation and protein crystallography.