Ansaris Receives Milestone Payment from Ono under Drug Discovery Collaboration

BLUE BELL, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Ansaris announced today that it has received a milestone payment for the successful identification of a kinase-related compound under its drug discovery collaboration with Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Ono will initiate the preclinical study of the identified compound. This collaboration between Ansaris and Ono was established to focus on the discovery of kinase-related compounds for the treatment of cancer, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Under the terms of the Drug Discovery Agreement, Ono has worldwide rights to develop and commercialize such compounds for all indications. In return, Ansaris is eligible to receive milestone payments on the progress of preclinical and clinical development, and royalty payments based on sales of the resulting products.

Ansaris utilizes their proprietary drug discovery technology to design molecules and optimize drug candidates for its collaborators. Their platform combines a torsion-space algorithm for building better protein models with in silico fragment-based drug design. The approach allows Ansaris to generate drug candidates when other small molecule discovery methods fail. “This milestone validates the strength of Ansaris’ platform and represents a significant achievement identifying compounds for challenging drug targets,” said Joan Lau, PhD, CEO of Ansaris. “We are pleased to have expanded the pipeline of our partner, Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.”

Kazuhito Kawabata, PhD, Managing Director, Research Headquarters at Ono noted, “I continue to be impressed with the drug discovery capabilities at Ansaris and their talented team of scientists. Ansaris generated a compound for a difficult drug target and we look forward to further successes from our collaborations.”

About Ansaris

Ansaris, a division of Locus Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is a privately-held biopharmaceutical company focused on solving today’s small molecule drug discovery challenges. Ansaris’ proprietary technology platform combines a torsion-space algorithm for building better protein modeling with in silico fragment-based drug design to yield break-through therapeutics. The approach has enabled the advancement of numerous “stalled” programs by identifying new protein forms and novel binding sites including competitive and allosteric sites on enzymes and hotspots for protein-protein interactions. Ansaris has successfully generated drug candidates in oncology, inflammation, infectious and cardiovascular diseases and currently has ongoing collaborations with Ono and Novartis. For further information on Ansaris, please visit the company’s website at www.ansarisbio.com.



CONTACT:

Ansaris
Elaine DePaul
Manager, Corporate Administration
215-358-2028
[email protected]

KEYWORDS:   United States  North America  Pennsylvania

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