Flagship Pioneering Announces Two New Agreements with Ampersand Biomedicines and Montai Therapeutics Under its Strategic Partnership with Pfizer
Ampersand's AND™ Platform will be used to identify programmed biologics for the
treatment of obesity-related targets
Montai's
CONECTA™ AI platform
will be used to identify small molecules directed to a
potential Non-Small Cell
Collaborations will leverage Pfizer's deep expertise in early discovery and development
for cardiometabolic and cancer treatments, two priority therapeutic areas for the
company
"These two new collaborations will separately leverage the pioneering bioplatform technologies of Ampersand and Montai to perform research, which may lead to future opportunities to develop new therapies in areas of critical unmet need," said
The agreements with Ampersand Biomedicines and Montai Therapeutics follow previously announced agreements with ProFound Therapeutics and Quotient Therapeutics, marking continued momentum for the partnership. Pioneering Medicines, Flagship's in house drug discovery and development unit, is responsible for leading Flagship's partnership with Pfizer, including driving the exploration process to rapidly surface potential drug discovery and research programs built on Flagship's diverse bioplatforms and modalities.
"Pfizer has deep expertise in cardiometabolic health and cancer drug discovery," said
Creating next-generation programmable medicines for the treatment of obesity
Ampersand is using its computationally-powered Address, Navigate, Determine (AND)™ Platform to program biologic medicines that work only where needed in the body and nowhere else. These AND-Body™ Therapeutics are designed to effectively target the site of disease without affecting healthy tissue or cells. As a part of the Flagship-Pfizer partnership, Ampersand will leverage its AND Platform to target tissue-selective metabolic pathways, offering a potent approach to potentially improve metabolic health.
"AND-Body Therapeutics represent a new type of programmable biologic that have a significantly improved therapeutic index when compared to non-targeted medicines, making them an attractive modality to address new targets for the treatment of obesity," said
Exploring the potential of Anthromolecules™ as a privileged starting point for a potential small molecule therapeutic for lung cancer
Montai's CONECTA platform integrates leading edge computational tools to decode links between hard-to-drug biological pathways and novel small molecule solutions from an untapped source of diverse human-qualified chemistry called Anthromolecules™. Montai has curated a library of more than 100 million Anthromolecules and their derivatives, whose topologically rich chemical structures are largely distinct from areas mined for conventional drug discovery. These molecules from traditional medicines, foods, and their metabolites possess fundamental scaffolds evolved to offer far greater precision and selectivity to engage biological pathways that drive chronic disease with a broad range of molecular modalities. As part of the Flagship-Pfizer partnership, Montai will deploy its CONECTA platform against oncogenic mechanisms that drive cancer cell growth and survival in order to identify new small molecules with the potential to be further developed as therapies for lung cancer.
"Montai's diverse chemistry, combined with our deep pathway network understanding, makes us uniquely positioned to pursue important immune system regulators in inflammation, autoimmune diseases and certain cancers, but have historically eluded small molecule drug developers," said
About Flagship Pioneering and Pioneering Medicines
Flagship Pioneering invents and builds bioplatform companies, each with the potential for multiple products that transform human health or sustainability. Since its launch in 2000, Flagship has originated and fostered more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in more than
Pioneering Medicines, Flagship Pioneering's in house drug development unit, is dedicated to conceiving and developing a broad portfolio of life-changing treatments for patients built from Flagship's innovative platforms. Harnessing the drug development expertise of its team together with the power of Flagship's multiple scientific platforms, Pioneering Medicines explores and identifies new product concepts which are then advanced jointly with Flagship's bioplatform companies. Within Flagship's Innovation Supply Chain partnerships, Pioneering Medicines works with external collaborators to apply its unique approach to partners' R&D priorities. These partnerships are highly co-creative strategic alliances that accelerate therapeutic innovation by bringing together partners spanning the full spectrum of drug discovery, development, and production.
About Ampersand Biomedicines
Ampersand Biomedicines enables a new way of programming medicines that work precisely where needed in the body and nowhere else. The company's computationally powered Address, Navigate, Determine (AND)™ Platform identifies ideal addresses for drug localization and informs the design of AND-Body™ Therapeutics that have the optimal therapeutic effect. The result is smarter biologic medicines that target the site of disease without affecting healthy tissue or cells. Ampersand Biomedicines was founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2021. For more information, please visit www.ampersand.bio.
About Montai Therapeutics
Montai is harnessing AI to decode untapped diverse chemistry to develop breakthrough oral medicines to address unmet patient needs across chronic disease. Montai's CONECTA™ platform has built the world's leading foundation models for decoding the complex language between nature's vast bioactive chemistry and human biology. CONECTA's curated collection of over 100M Anthromolecules™ and Anthrologs™ offers a privileged starting point for drug development by unlocking efficient access to vast untapped structural diversity with potential to modulate complex biology with greater precision and selectivity, and to molecules with 1000s of years of validated human consumption history in food, herbs and traditional medicines. CONECTA's foundation models enable it to efficiently train machine learning models to precision match, prioritize, and optimize candidates from diverse chemistry to solve complex biological pathways – supercharging expert biologists and drug developers with unprecedented optionality and predictability in drug discovery. With an initial focus on inflammation and immunology, Montai is developing a broad pipeline of first in class oral medicines to replace biologics and solve hard-to-drug targets such as transcription factors. Montai was founded in
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