PRISM BioLab Co Ltd, a discovery and development biotechnology company based in Japan, announced on Wednesday that it has formed a collaboration with Talus Bioscience Inc, a US-based, AI-enabled regulome therapeutics company, to discover novel inhibitors of transcription factor (TF) and protein-protein interaction (PPI) targets.

Under the agreement, the companies will deploy PRISM's proprietary small-molecule libraries in Talus Bio's AI-guided regulome profiling screens to identify and optimise novel compounds against high-value TF and PPI targets. The collaboration aims to generate first-in-class chemical matter with direct functional effects on TF and PPI activity in live human cells. Talus Bio and PRISM will share the costs of discovery research and development and any profits generated from out-licensing and commercialisation of discovered drug products.

Dai Takehara, PRISM's president and CEO, said: "We are delighted to partner with Talus Bio on this exciting project. We at PRISM have developed chemistries for PPI targets, but because of the complex nature of these targets, it is often challenging to properly model protein-protein interactions in a biochemical assay. Even when we are successful, we can interrogate only one target at a time, whereas Talus Bio technologies can interrogate hundreds to thousands of these targets in parallel and in their native environment. We believe that the combination of PRISM's chemistry platform and Talus Bio's regulome analysis platform has a potential to discover a plethora of inhibitors against previously 'undruggable' TF and PPI targets and open a path for the development of novel therapeutics."