PhoreMost Ltd., the UK-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to ‘Drugging the Undruggable®’ disease targets, and ThinkCyte K.K, a biotechnology company pioneering novel cell analysis and sorting instruments, has announced a strategic research partnership aimed at advancing modern phenotypic drug screening using artificial intelligence (AI).

The partnership leverages both companies’ distinctive technologies in high-throughput drug discovery, PhoreMost’s next-generation phenotypic screening platform, SITESEEKER®, and ThinkCyte’s AI-driven cell characterization and sorting platform, Ghost Cytometry®, with the aim of developing differentiated therapies for a range of diseases with unmet clinical need.

Driven by advances in cell-based phenotypic screening tools and novel target discovery technologies, the power of Phenotypic Drug Discovery (PDD) lies in its unmatched ability to find completely new drug targets and disease mechanisms, providing not only new drug candidates, but a better understanding of disease. PhoreMost’s SITESEEKER platform, based on the Company’s core proprietary ‘Protein Interference’ (PROTEINi) technology, probes the entire proteome to systematically unmask new and unanticipated druggable sites, directly linking them to useful therapeutic functions. ThinkCyte has pioneered Ghost Cytometry, an approach that enables detection of novel, disease-related phenotypes. By combining SITESEEKER to identify novel druggable targets with Ghost Cytometry to identify subtle phenotypic changes in living cells, the partnership aims to develop an entirely unique approach to high-content phenotypic screening. The research partnership will drive ThinkCyte deeper into the field of early drug discovery and will contribute to PhoreMost’s mission of ‘Drugging the Undruggable®’.

“PhoreMost has embraced the revolution in computational methods to transform the way we approach modern drug discovery,” said Dr. Benedict Cross, CTO of PhoreMost. “By combining ThinkCyte’s AI-based platform to detect novel, disease-related phenotypes with our SITESEEKER phenotypic screening platform, we hope to more efficiently uncover a broad range of novel targets and translate them into high-quality first-in-class therapeutic assets”

“We are very excited about the research partnership with PhoreMost, a leader in applying innovative approaches and technologies to open up new druggable spaces.” said Waichiro Katsuda, CEO at ThinkCyte. “We have been privileged to work with drug discovery industry partners who share our vision of using AI to rethink traditional approaches in R&D and look forward to working together with PhoreMost to advance our technologies towards the shared goal of making meaningful impact for people suffering from serious diseases.”

About PhoreMost Ltd

PhoreMost has developed a next-generation phenotypic screening platform called SITESEEKER® that can discern the best new targets for future therapy and crucially, how to drug them, which has the potential to significantly increase the diversity and affordability of novel therapeutics for cancer and other unmet diseases. Based on the Company's core proprietary 'Protein Interference' technology, SITESEEKER® systematically unmasks cryptic druggable sites across the entire human genome and directly links them to useful therapeutic functions in a live-cell context. Using this platform, PhoreMost is building a pipeline of novel drug discovery programmes aimed at addressing a range of unmet diseases.

About ThinkCyte

ThinkCyte, founded in 2016 with offices in Tokyo, Japan and San Carlos, California is a biotechnology company that develops innovative scientific instruments based on integrated, multidisciplinary technologies to enable life science research, diagnostics, and therapeutic development. The company pioneered Ghost Cytometry, a proprietary AI-based, label-free cell sorting technology and partners with major global biopharmaceutical companies and leading academic research institutes to further drive groundbreaking research.