Epistemic Drug Discovery

EPISTEMIC DRUG DISCOVERY

In response to the changing and challenging environment for procuring more effective and safer drugs, Prous Institute is developing its Epistemic Drug Discovery® project, based on the in silico generation of working hypotheses and the experimental evaluation of their validity using in vitro assays and in vivo animal models. The project aims to speed up the process of drug discovery and development, reducing time-cost and attrition rate. The process involves the 10 steps below:

Ten Steps to Epistemic Drug Discovery

1. Identify a therapeutic need.

2. Clearly understand the area of drug therapy to be investigated.

3. Construct large libraries of compounds related to the area to be investigated (PSMEL®), including those with reported preclinical data (training sets) and those generated by our IGSME® (In silico Generation of Small Molecular Entities) process.

4. Design new bioactive compounds based on rational approaches to drug discovery, and generate a library with those compounds to be subsequently incorporated into the central library mentioned in point 3.

5. Check patentability of designed compounds.

6. Virtually screen compounds in the libraries using our proprietary cheminformatics tools (SYMMETRY®). Each compound is predicted to interact with one or more targets or pathways, produce more than one therapeutic outcome, and have an ADMET profile.

7. Select and synthesize the most promising compounds from the in silico studies.

8. Prepare preclinical itineraries for validating the results from predictive studies and translate them to promising targeted therapies.

9. Estimate the compound's market value based on efficacy, safety and differentiation from more advanced drugs in the same class or drugs with similar indications in a different class of mechanism.

10. File IND (Investigational New Drug) application and initiate phase I clinical studies.

Case Study 2 Now Available: New Approaches to the Discovery of Targeted Therapies II: Discovery of Multitargeted Agents from Medicinal Plants

2012 May 11

SYMMETRY® − an ensemble of computational tools and methods aiming to replicate all the processes through which new drugs are discovered, developed and approved – supports several strategies to discover new drugs. Here we describe modifying the chemical structures of natural products to improve their pharmacological efficacy and ADMET profiles as well as identifying new indications....

Category: Oncology, Publications, Proof of Concept, Drug Discovery, Toxicology, Symmetry

Case Study 1 Now Available: New Approaches to the Discovery of Targeted Therapies I: Discovery of SGLT2 Inhibitors to Control Hyperglycemia in Type 2 Diabetes

2012 May 11

Illustrates how new targeted therapies for type 2 diabetes can be discovered using the Prous Institute SYMMETRY® drug discovery platform. The approach has been successfully applied across other diverse therapeutic targets and disease areas, including cancer, pain and neurodegeneration. The platform aims to speed up the process of drug discovery and development, reducing time cost and attrition...

Category: Diabetes, Publications, Proof of Concept, Drug Discovery, Symmetry

New Patent Application Published for Prous Institute's Multi Kinase Inhibitors (WO 2012013691 A1)

2012 Feb 10

Compounds developed using Prous Institute Symmetry® Drug Discovery Platform open new avenues in cancer treatment Prous Institute for Biomedical Research has announced the recent publishing of its new WIPO patent application. The cited compounds figured among the new magnolol and honokiol derivatives obtained at the Prous Institute for Biomedical Research that have shown inhibitory activ...

Category: Pipeline, Oncology, News, Technology, Proof of Concept, Drug Discovery, Symmetry