A BioSpace article recently credited clinical-stage pharmaceutical company Verseon for fundamentally changing the drug-discovery process. Verseon has devised a novel approach that expands the universe of potential drug candidates to a billion trillion trillion possibilities.
FREMONT, Calif., May 13, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- BioSpace recently hailed Verseon for fundamentally changing the pharmaceutical industry's drug-discovery process. The rest of the industry can only investigate variations on fewer than ten million previously synthesized chemical backbones. Constraints include limited existing experimental data, the cost of synthesizing new chemical entities, and crude implementations of artificial intelligence. But Verseon has devised a novel approach to navigate among a billion trillion trillion possibilities.
The article describes Verseon's discovery process in three parts.
First, the company's platform creates a virtual ocean of compounds. Other attempts to create virtual chemical libraries have failed to consider the reaction steps necessary for synthesis. However, Verseon's platform always generates the set of steps required to make each promising compound.
Then, the platform examines in silico how billions of different virtually constructed molecules will bind to an intended target protein. Verseon's breakthroughs in modeling molecular physics make predictions sufficiently accurate to replace the need to synthesize and experimentally test the binding properties of the same number of new chemicals in the lab, a process that would take millennia to complete.
After vetting each novel drug-like compound in silico, Verseon only synthesizes and tests the most promising families of chemicals. The company's AI optimizes these molecules to systematically generate novel clinical candidates with uniquely desirable therapeutic profiles for every drug program.
BioSpace notes that as Verseon pursues this approach, it is beginning to fill in the map of uncharted drug discovery space. In effect, it is replacing the void of "here be dragons" (as one 16th-century mapmaker warned) with islands of known entities.
CEO Adityo Prakash said, "We live in a biology-rich, chemistry-poor world where the industry is challenged to find truly novel drugs. That's why the pharmaceutical industry's R&D productivity has dropped over the years."
But Verseon is not stuck in the same tidepool that has trapped the rest of the industry. The proof of how well the company's approach works is its drug programs across different disease indications.
The company has six molecules in its three cancer programs and two each for its liver disease, cardiovascular, and diabetic vision loss programs. In each program, the candidates are chemically distinct from one another and have novel modes of action.
Because of its technological advancements rooted in physics and AI, Verseon has opened access to the ocean of drug-like chemical families that no one has explored before.
About Verseon
To advance global health, Verseon International Corporation (http://www.verseon.com) has created a better, more scalable process for designing and developing new drugs addressing currently untreatable or poorly treated conditions. The company's drug development platform incorporates fundamental advancements in molecular modeling, directed synthesis, integrated translational research and AI to develop drug compounds that have never before been synthesized—and are virtually impossible to find using conventional methods. Verseon is a clinical-stage company with a growing pipeline that currently includes seven drug programs in the areas of anticoagulation, diabetic retinopathy, hereditary angioedema, oncology, and metabolic disorders.
Media Contact
Walter Jones, Verseon International Corporation, 1 510 225 9001, [email protected]
SOURCE Verseon International Corporation
Share this article