Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has entered into an agreement with Congenia, a biotechnology company promoted by Italy's Genextra SpA group to provide advanced fragment-based lead optimization solutions for drug discovery.
The agreement is the first of its kind for an IT company. The Life Sciences R&D Division of TCS will work on "P66" - a target protein identified by Congenia as a key protein involved in several age-related diseases - and will develop optimized drug leads based on this.
TCS will be using modules of its own product "Bio-Suite" to work on the target protein. It will screen a "virtual fragment library" of tens of thousands of potential lead molecules to predict which of these might bind themselves to the target protein and thereby inhibit its function. TCS will also produce a first-cut analysis of the ADMET (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity) profile of the lead molecules.
The optimized lead molecules produced by TCS will be further developed by Congenia through animal trials and eventually human clinical trials. The work will be executed in the Advanced Technology Centre of TCS, located at Hyderabad, where the bulk of TCS' life sciences R&D activities are located, a release from TCS said here.
A part of the wet chemistry and crystallography work will be carried out by TCS' sub-contractor, Altiora Ventures in Israel. The biological assays will be carried out by Congenia in Milan, Italy. The contract has duration of 18 months, and incorporates payments based on the number of optimized lead molecules delivered.
Dr M Vidyasagar, executive vice president and head of TCS' Advanced Technology Centre, said: "TCS is committed to putting in place a complete suite of offerings in the life sciences segment, spanning genomics and proteomics, database integration, drug discovery, and preventive healthcare."
Paolo Fundaro, CEO of Congenia said, "TCS' competencies in bio-chemistry and computation techniques offer a unique value proposition. Using these techniques, we expect to obtain good lead candidates for a drug for pre-clinical trials and save time in R&D."
Congenia, which is 100 per cent owned by Genextra SpA, is a drug discovery company active in research and development in the fields of biotechnology, biomedicine and functional genomics with particular focus on cancer pathologies related to aging and degenerative cell disorders. The company holds the patent for the research and commercial utilization of the gene p66.
Genextra is a holding company investing in start-ups in the fields of pharmacogenomics and biotechnologies. Genextra, taking advantage of the knowledge that can be collected and developed in the post-genomic era, invests in research aimed at the prevention, diagnosis, therapy and prognosis of diseases linked to aging.