Artificial-intelligence-powered drug designer Schrödinger has absorbed a small company specializing in X-ray crystallography to help boost its ability to map out the shapes of target proteins and find the therapeutic molecules that may best work against them.
The company acquired XTAL BioStructures through a $6 million all-cash deal Jan. 14, which includes 18 employees and a headquarters that will continue to operate just outside Boston. Founded in 2005, XTAL has focused on providing a variety of protein analysis, production and purification services to biopharma customers.
“Through the integration of experimental and computational approaches, we can continue to improve techniques to prepare proteins for structure-based drug design methods,” Schrödinger CEO Ramy Farid said in a statement. “Because high-quality protein structures are core to our business, we wanted to bring these experimental capabilities in-house.”
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The acquisition also aims to expand Schrödinger’s capacity to provide customers with protein structures that have been validated in computer models and are ready to advance into structure-based virtual screening and lead optimization programs.
Schrödinger’s in-house pipeline of its own computer-generated drugs, meanwhile, has begun to move forward with sights set on oncology. Late last year, the company teamed up with MD Anderson Cancer Center to develop its WEE1 inhibitor, which targets an enzyme that may help strengthen tumor cells.
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And last month, Schrödinger presented preclinical data on its MALT1 inhibitor program in B-cell lymphomas, during the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology. Early in vitro results showed the company’s potential drug-induced tumor regression as a single agent and led to complete tumor regression when combined with AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson’s BTK inhibitor Imbruvica.