Daewoong Pharmaceutical said that it would develop an anticancer treatment using artificial intelligence jointly with its U.S. partner, A2A Pharmaceutical.

Daewoong CEO Jeon Seng-ho (left) and A2A CEO Sotirios Stergiopoulos shake hands after signing the cooperative agreement during the 2020 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Calif., on Sunday.

Under the accord, A2A will design new compounds using “SCULPT,” a new drug design platform combined with AI, and Daewoong will conduct material synthesis and evaluation based on the compounds to select new drug candidates for anticancer drugs.

A2A's SCULPT uses proprietary technology to analyze precisely the structure of cancer-causing pharmacological targets and build hundreds of unique materials for targets to build a library of target-based compounds.

It is a drug discovery platform that can select materials optimized for the target by predicting the binding force and drug properties of the material through AI learning.

The technology allows the design of superior materials for targets that are difficult to control with conventional synthetic drug discovery methods. Also, it is an innovative platform that can be effectively applied to targets, where deriving new compounds using is difficult with existing AI technology due to a lack of information on targets.

According to Daewoong, A2A has demonstrated the superiority of SCULPT through its anticancer and refractory disease pipeline.

Daewoong said it expects to discover the best anticancer drug candidates through SCULPT and increase the chances of success of developing an anticancer drug. Also, the company hopes the exploration of candidate materials through the use of an AI platform will save time and cost for developing new drugs.

"By combining A2A's SCULPT platform with Daewoong's R&D capabilities, we expect to enhance the development competitiveness of anticancer drugs," Daewoong CEO Jeon Seng-ho said. "We will do our best to make Daewoong and A2A's open collaboration a representative case of AI-based drug development."

A2A CEO Sotirios Stergiopoulos also said, "A2A's technology has already shown its superiority in researching drug discovery for difficult-to-drug targets."

The company is delighted to have partnered with Daewoong and look forward to working with the company to provide high-quality medicines to patients as soon as possible, Stergiopoulos added.

corea022@docdocdoc.co.kr

<© Korea Biomedical Review, All rights reserved.>