Posted on October 11th, 2018 by admin in The Hive
Beacon Discovery is a science-focused company with a huge breadth of experience in discovering and developing drugs that target G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) – and, in the two years since our founding in September 2016, we have already achieved some important milestones. Specifically, we have announced three major drug discovery collaborations: two with large pharmaceutical partners, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company and Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and one with an up-and-coming start-up called Escient Pharmaceuticals.
The benefits of collaboration
These companies recognized our passion for science and experience in GPCR research as a great way to explore new GPCR targets. Because GPCRs occupy a wide swath of therapeutic space, we can leverage Takeda and Janssen’s therapeutic area expertise and focus on developing the best GPCR ligands possible. And if our efforts to identify drug candidates for treating unmet medical needs are successful, then Takeda and Janssen will have the option to use their considerable resources and expertise to develop, manufacture and commercialize products that result from our collaborations.
Meanwhile we will also be able to bring our own expertise in orphan GPCR drug discovery to support Escient’s preclinical discovery work. Escient’s President and CEO, Alain Baron, has credited our scientists as being “invaluable” to their launch effort, and we are proud to be working alongside this exciting new innovator. We feel that demonstrating our GPCR prowess with our partners will set us up well for extending these existing partnerships, and for developing others in the future.
Tools for discovery
Another partnership of sorts for us has been as participants in the Hive. As a part of the Hive program, we have been able to utilize Elsevier tools in all of our projects. The chemistry solution Reaxys has been most important as we discover new molecules upon which to build drug discovery targets. Having integrated databases of patent and synthetic data which is chemically searchable provides us the ability to understand the competition in chemical, biological and patent space. The chemical synthesis database within Reaxys allows us to efficiently turn our chemical ideas into synthetic reality.
As we are also developing internal programs, Pathway Studio is another Elsevier solution that is becoming part of our process for translating biological hypotheses into experimental data.
Staying competitive in the coming year
Heading into 2019, our most important objective will be to deliver on the research plans that we have developed with our collaborators. Our second objective is to further our exploration of novel targets for diseases of the Central Nervous System.
As we pursue these goals, we are confident that our approach will keep us competitive in the growing GPCR discovery space. For us, it’s really about the team and the lengths we go to in order to understand the fundamentals of assay development to ensure that we are asking the right questions to more robustly move our projects forward.
Author
Carleton Sage
Carleton Sage has 21 years of drug discovery experience in the biotech industry in internal and partnered drug discovery and design projects. The areas that Carleton has focused his development efforts include Metabolism, CNS, Inflammation, and Cardiovascular disease. Carleton holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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