e-therapeutics PLC (LON:ETX) has reached two key milestones in its collaboration with Galapagos NV, triggering two payments to the company.
The two operational and success-based milestones were defined in a collaboration agreement signed in June 2020.
Galapagos, a commercial-stage company focused on the discovery and development of small molecule medicines, has been using e-therapeautics’ proprietary computational platform which allows ‘in silico’ testing of computational platform.
The platform has been used to successfully identify hit compounds against a specific biological process of interest to Galapagos involved in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and potentially in other fibrotic indications, e-therapeutics said.
Also, experimental testing of the computationally predicted compound set was carried out in several relevant assays and yielded a hit rate orders of magnitude higher than industry standards for early phenotypic drug discovery, it added.
"e-therapeutics' ability to model human disease processes effectively in silico addresses critical limitations of the drug discovery process,” said Ali Mortazavi, e-therapeutics chief executive.
“Our deeper understanding of underlying disease biology and ability to test millions of possible therapeutic interventions computationally ahead of experimental validation have the potential to mitigate late-stage, costly failures in drug development.
“The progress made to date in our collaboration with Galapagos to discover novel therapeutics in IPF and fibrosis is yet another validation of our technology platform, which can be applied to any therapeutic area."
Further milestone payments will be due under the collaboration agreement through the pre-clinical and clinical development process, and commercial milestone payments are also defined in the agreement.