Ipsen taps Synthace to automate drug discovery

Ipsen has teamed up with Synthace to ramp up the development of new treatments targeting secretion in a wide range of diseases, including oncology, endocrinology, pain management and rare disease. The company is also exploring the use of these drugs in regenerative medicine.

The pact focuses on targeted secretion inhibitors (TSIs), which are made by fusing parts of the botulinum neurotoxin with another protein. Doing this stops botulinum from doing what neurotoxins do—block neurotransmitters—instead turning them into “uniquely targeted therapeutics” that block specific secretions that cause disease.

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TSIs are complex and labor-intensive to design and make, taking teams 30 days to come up with a few dozen constructs to put through screening, the companies said in a statement.

And that’s where Synthace and its Antha technology come in. It allowed Ipsen to create and test its candidates in silico before testing them in the lab. The French pharma is now making TSI constructs five times faster than with previous methods, according to the statement.

“The development of novel biotherapeutics like TSI is key to treating debilitating illnesses across multiple therapeutic areas,” said Karen Bunting, Ph.D., director of protein science at Ipsen, in the statement. “The first step in this is generating and screening high-quality molecules as therapeutic candidates. Using Antha, our team increased throughput at this crucial step, allowing us to design, construct, and screen novel TSI candidates rapidly and helping to advance our therapeutic solutions.”