Cellworks Research India Pvt Ltd, research arm of the US based Cellworks Group Inc., is in discussion with major Indian research driven pharmaceutical companies for strategic partnership to offer advanced 'in silico' platform for new drug discovery.

The company is looking for one or two potential partners each in five identified therapeutic area of research, namely oncology (breast cancer and small lung cancer), inflammatory diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, Intestinal Bowel Disorder), skin (pigmentation), type II diabetes and neurological disease. The company is in discussion with some of the major research based companies in the country but the Cellworks officials refused to comment more on the firms which they are in talks with.

"We are on various levels of discussion with potential R&D companies in a wider landscape of Indian pharmaceutical industry. With the partnership, we are looking for multiple approach for finding the target molecule in the specific disease area," said Taher Abbasi, CEO and COO, Cellworks Group Inc.

At present, the pharma firms including Ranbaxy Laboratories, Nicholas Piramal India Ltd, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, Dr Reddy's Laboratories, Sun Pharmaceuticals, Advinus Theraputics, Torrent Pharmaceuticals and Lupin Ltd have their known proficiency in New Chemical Entity (NCE) and New Molecular Entity (NME) research.

Cellworks will offer in silico platform based on Systems Biology to develop a disease physiology aligned virtual experimental system to differentiate a promising and successful molecule in the pre-clinical study itself. The method would help the companies to reduce the number of experiments to cut the experimentation cost to almost 30 per cent. Moreover, early identification of the potential of the subject molecule would save the time as well as money of the research firm, added Tahir Abbasi.

"Once there is a system which is physiologically aligned, the research group can skip many repeated experiment processes from the project. We are validating whatever is known through our system and the accuracy in identification is 100 percent," he added. The company's business model focuses on collaboration, licensing and patenting of new biology targets.

The two-year-old Cellworks Group has partnered with four major global pharma-biotech companies and has entered into alliance with research institutes like University of California, Davis, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, University of Hyderabad and Amrita University to work on specific projects.