Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (Otsuka) announces it has entered into a multi-project collaboration with PhoreMost Limited, a UK-based biopharmaceutical company that focuses on the elucidation of currently undruggable disease targets, with the ultimate aim to enable research and development of new drugs and diagnostics.

PhoreMost will deploy its in-house expertise and phenotypic screening platform, SITESEEKER^®, towards disease-relevant pathways nominated by Otsuka. Novel targets identified will be further validated and characterised by Otsuka as part of its internal development pipeline, with an initial focus on gene therapy applications of identified targets.

PhoreMost's SITESEEKER platform exploits protein-shape diversity to find functionally active peptides, enhancing the power of phenotypic screening and the potential for translation into therapeutic modalities. Based on proprietary protein-interference technology, PhoreMost uses SITESEEKER to probe the entire proteome in a live-cell environment to seek novel targets linked to any chosen disease.