NeoGenesis Pharmaceuticals and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have signed a collaborative agreement to discover and develop new drugs that target cancer and inflammatory diseases. This collaboration -- between NeoGenesis and Brian Seed, at MGH, a world-renowned expert in molecular biotechnology -- presents an opportunity and framework to discover and develop potent and unique small molecule drugs against an unprecedented number of disease targets to treat important human diseases.

Dr. Seed has built a proteomics facility in Cambridge with the capacity to produce and characterize hundreds of disease-associated proteins from the genome. NeoGenesis will utilize its small molecule selection technology, known as ALIS, and its proprietary libraries of approximately 10 million compounds to identify small molecules that bind to these protein targets and evolve them to lead compounds.

NeoGenesis has developed a highly industrialized and scalable technology platform with the capacity to screen hundreds of proteins per year, with plans to expand that capacity to meet future internal and external demands.

Dr. Seed, a member of the MGH Molecular Biology Department and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, said, "Over the years a number of approaches have been developed to identify small molecule interactions with protein targets, but few of these can be scaled to efficiently handle large numbers of proteins, or protein families, and millions of small molecule compounds. The method developed by NeoGenesis allows very large numbers of compounds from their ten million compound libraries to be screened simultaneously. This is the only drug discovery technology that I am aware of that scales to the scope of the genome and that will allow us to discover drugs against any target class."

Satish Jindal, chief executive officer of NeoGenesis, said, "We are very pleased to be involved in a drug discovery collaboration with Mass General Hospital. Dr. Seed is a scientific thought leader in understanding the molecular mechanisms and pathways that underlie cancer and inflammatory diseases and is committed to discovering and developing new drugs. Several of his technologies have already found their way into the marketplace, and we expect this collaboration to result in the discovery of novel therapeutics to treat important human diseases."

Under the terms of the four-year collaboration, MGH will supply NeoGenesis with proteins believed to play important roles in oncology and inflammatory diseases. NeoGenesis will apply its NeoMorph 10 million compound libraries and its proprietary Automated Ligand Identification System (ALIS) to these targets to discover small molecule drug-like compounds exhibiting high affinity and selectivity against the target proteins. MGH will then characterize these compounds in a variety of disease-based assays and animal models, and NeoGenesis will initiate clinical development.