JPM week in San Francisco is always a busy time and a great time to connect with brilliant scientists and leaders doing amazing things in the world of biotech and pharmaceutical research. For anyone in the industry attending, the week is a whirlwind of hotel conference rooms, meetings with potential collaborators, and networking sessions filled with business leaders and researchers accomplishing amazing things. We were delighted to reconnect with a number of our partners who are among this group, working to have an impact in areas that hold massive potential for improving the lives of millions worldwide.
We got to catch up with Phoremost, a UK-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to ‘Drugging the Undruggable®’ disease targets. They are pursuing some of the most difficult targets in oncology using their SiteSeeker phenotypic screening platform, which they have also used in partnerships with large, multinational pharmaceutical companies such as Roche and Boehringer Ingelheim, specifically targeting novel E3-ligands for PROTAC and glue drug development.
Another company working to address difficult-to-treat conditions such as cancer is Auransa, a clinical-stage biotech that applies AI/ML to biology-based in California. We have been collaborating on treatments for women’s health with Auransa over the years, joining their forte in the application of AI in understanding complex disease biology with our quantum computing to discover potentially new molecular treatments for conditions like triple-negative breast cancer and endometriosis. At JPM, our CEO Shahar Keinan was able to connect in person with their CEO, Pek Lum, to brainstorm ways that new technologies could allow researchers to study these types of conditions that may have been overlooked by previous generations of pharmaceutical research. We sincerely hope that through projects like ours with Auransa, we can utilize our own quantum computing-based molecular optimization tools to further research into conditions like these that affect populations that have not historically been at the forefront of discovery initiatives.
We also had the opportunity to sit down with Bruce Meyers from Allosteric Bioscience, who is focused on researching several proteins that could represent significant achievements in the area of aging and human longevity. Recently they have announced a sponsored research partnership with Dr. Susan Michaelis from Johns Hopkins University, in the area of Optimizing Aging and Longevity. The company is targeting a protein ABI 11 that is involved in the premature aging genetic condition Progeria and is involved in normal aging. The company believes that modulating this protein has the potential to Optimize Normal Aging and Longevity as well.
All of these partners are doing groundbreaking research on many fronts, and we are glad to be a part of that progress. At POLARISqb, it is our goal to work with researchers to accelerate molecular discovery on a wide variety of initiatives and targets. Our Quantum-Aided Drug Design platform (QuADD) makes it possible for discovery teams to build high-quality molecular libraries by utilizing the increased optimization power of today’s quantum computers. On QuADD it is possible to query a chemical space of up to a nonillion (1030) potential molecules to determine the candidates that are most likely to be a best fit for a specific protein pocket, as well as have drug-like characteristics. If your discovery team is interested in finding out how you may be able to use our platform to accelerate your own drug design and discovery processes, contact us here today.
