Abzu® and Contera Pharma expand their strategic partnership to add drug-target identification to their seminal RNA- and siRNAs therapeutic design platform.
Contera Pharma is a Danish biotech company developing innovative small-molecule and RNA-based therapeutics to address neurological disorders. Their unique R&D model integrates their team of experienced neuroscience drug hunters with cutting-edge technology, like Abzu’s proprietary discovery engine, the QLattice®, to develop precision medicines.
Abzu’s QLattice, a new class of explainable artificial intelligence with recently-patented technology, accelerates scientists’ exploration and understanding of relationships in data. Abzu and Contera Pharma initially collaborated in July 2021 to incorporate the QLattice into an RNA therapeutic design application.
The application designs RNA therapeutics through parallel hypotheses testing of drug targets and individual antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) drug properties.
After seeing accelerated progress on two undisclosed therapeutics currently in preclinical testing, Abzu and Contera Pharma agreed to expand their strategic partnership, adding siRNAs and target identification to the platform.
“Our expanded strategic partnership is based on a three-pronged approach to strengthen our drug discovery platform: First, we run ASO drug design by automation; second, we will add siRNAs as an RNA therapeutic modality; and third, we identify novel targets with Abzu’s explainable artificial intelligence,” says Kenneth Christensen, Chief Scientific Officer of Contera Pharma.
“We want to turbocharge the development of RNA medicines,” says Martin Kerr, Head of Business Development and Pharma Partnerships at Abzu. “With Contera Pharma, we’re designing RNA medicines to multiple targets — all at once — which means that we’re breaking new ground faster than anyone else.”
Combined, this expanded partnership advances the companies vision to accelerate the drug discovery process by deepening the disease and disease-target understanding and at the same time accelerating rational drug design.
About Abzu.
Founded in 2018, Abzu® builds trustworthy AI to tackle complex challenges for the world’s leading companies. Abzu established itself as a global leader in explainable, rational, and safe AI in the pharmaceutical industry, contributing to new discoveries in disease understanding and RNA therapeutics. Today, Abzu’s technology accelerates new insights and understanding in pharma R&D and transforms critical and complex business processes for enterprise operations.
Abzu has offices in Copenhagen and Barcelona, and has raised €13.3M in total funding to date. Abzu has been mentioned in Gartner® research, from Market Guides for AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management to CoolVendor™, and is the winner of several awards, including the 2023 “Best HealthTech” Nordics Award at the Nordic Startup Awards. For more information, visit www.abzu.ai.
About Contera Pharma.
Contera Pharma is focused on developing new treatments for people suffering from neurological disorders. Contera Pharma’s science is based on a precision medicine approach integrating external and internal data sources to support rational selection of human disease-validated drug discovery targets to identify novel pipeline opportunities within neurological disorders.
The company’s lead asset, JM-010, is currently in Phase IIb clinical testing for Parkinson’s disease dyskinesia.
Contera Pharma was founded in 2010 and has offices in Hørsholm, Denmark and Seoul, South-Korea.
For more information, visit: www.conterapharma.com.
