Standigm signs MOU with Institut Pasteur Korea for AI-based drug discovery research on infectious disease

SEOUL, South Korea, Nov. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Standigm Inc. ("Standigm"), the leading workflow artificial intelligence (AI) drug discovery company, today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding ("MOU") with Institut Pasteur Korea ("IPK"), the infectious disease-focused research institute contributing to public health, for AI-based drug discovery research for infectious disease. The MOU signing took place at the headquarters of Standigm, attended by Jinhan Kim, CEO of Standigm, and Youngmee Jee, CEO of IPK.

The endeavor combines Standigm's AI drug discovery platform and IPK's research expertise in infectious disease. Under the MOU, the two parties will actively conduct joint research and academic exchanges to derive innovative drug candidates for infectious disease, setting the research priority on discovering novel anti-tubercular drug candidates.

Previously, the two parties conducted research collaboration on anti-tubercular drug discovery, applying Standigm's deep learning technology to the data generated through IPK's cell-based screening of one hundred thousand compounds against tuberculosis. As a result, hit compounds with several key scaffolds effective in multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR/XDR-TB) were identified.

The follow-up research on these hits, 'Validation and optimization of an AI-driven platform for anti-tubercular drug discovery' has been selected for the Research Investment for Global Health Technology Fund's ("RIGHT Fund") "Technical Accelerator Award". The RIGHT Fund is a global health research funding foundation established in 2018 through the public-private partnership between the Ministry of Health and Welfare of South Korea, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), and Korean life science companies to address the medical and technological needs towards alleviating the burden of infectious diseases especially in developing countries. Standigm has been selected as a grantee for the RIGHT Fund's innovative infectious disease R&D project with IPK as its collaborating research partner.

Based on a list of key scaffolds identified in the previous research collaboration, Standigm will explore novel lead structures with improved anti-tubercular activity. For this, Standigm will utilize its proprietary AI platform for compound design (Standigm BEST^TM). The scaffold-based generation module will generate novel anti-tubercular molecules based on predefined key scaffolds. After that, the activity prediction model which deep learned 3D molecular features will prioritize the most active anti-tubercular compounds and select the final candidates for synthesis.

IPK will synthesize the virtual candidates derived by Standigm into real chemical compounds and evaluate their efficacy, leveraging years of expertise in anti-tubercular drug discovery research. In particular, each compound will be tested and validated through cell culture experiments using IPK's image-based screening platform in the biosafety level-3.

"There are considerable difficulties in anti-tubercular drug discovery, such as resistance and interaction with other drugs. It is not easy to recover drug development costs because it occurs frequently among socially and economically vulnerable groups, making it one of disease that needs the most innovation in the drug development process," said Jinhan Kim, Co-founder and CEO of Standigm. "By pooling research expertise of IPK and Standigm's AI technology together, we expect to accelerate the discovery of innovative new tuberculosis drugs by reducing the time and cost compared to traditional methodologies," he added.

"Through this research collaboration with Standigm, we will establish and verify innovative strategies that can accelerate AI-based infectious disease research, and improve the efficiency of drug discovery," said Youngmee Jee, CEO of IPK. "Furthermore, we will continue multidimensional research and collaborations, including conducting follow-up research to commercialize the new anti-tubercular drug candidate developed by the IPK, TTCA, and contribute to the worldwide efforts to end the tuberculosis epidemic by 2030," she added.

About Standigm
Standigm is a workflow AI-driven drug discovery company headquartered in Seoul, South Korea and subsidized in Cambridge, UK. Standigm has proprietary AI platforms encompassing novel target identification to compound design, to generate commercially valuable drug pipelines. Founded in 2015, Standigm has established an early stage drug discovery workflow AI to generate multiple First-in-Class compounds within seven months. Pursuing full-stack, AI-driven industrializing drug discovery, Standigm has achieved the automation of molecular design workflow, and the automation effort has been expanding to the whole drug discovery process based on Standigm AI platforms, including Standigm ASK™ for novel target discovery, Standigm BEST™ for novel compound generation. Learn more at http://www.standigm.com.

About Institut Pasteur Korea
Institut Pasteur Korea (IPK) is a non-profit research institute established in 2004 as part of the scientific cooperation between the Rep. of Korea and France, focusing on infectious diseases. Utilizing its core research capabilities, cell- and image-based screening platforms, to understand disease mechanisms and accelerate the development of new treatments, IPK contributes to addressing unmet global health issues, including emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19, MERS, and Zika fever, viral hepatitis, tuberculosis, antibiotic resistance, cancer, and neglected diseases. By providing fundamental technologies to bridge Korean and international bio-pharma science and promote multi-disciplinary projects globally, IPK stands at the forefront of drug discovery research contributing to Korea's scientific, intellectual, and technical resources and global infectious disease preparedness and response. IPK is an integral member of the Pasteur Network, consisting of 33 members located in 25 countries. (www.ip-korea.org)

Contacts

Standigm 
Sangah Lee  
sangah.lee@standigm.com   
+82-2-501-8118

Institut Pasteur Korea
Jieun Kim  
[email protected]   
+82-31-8018-8041

SOURCE Standigm