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.
Abzu® empowers scientists to bring drugs to market faster by accelerating their exploration and understanding.
Abzu’s expertise in disease understanding and drug discovery — combined with its proprietary QLattice® discovery engine — quickly reveals related biological mechanisms in data to drive discoveries and reduce R&D timelines and costs.
Founded in January 2018, Abzu is a deep tech startup with offices in Copenhagen, Denmark and Barcelona, Spain.
To learn more, 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.
