7 May 2018 - - Durham, NC-based drug discovery company Icagen, Inc. has received an award valued at up to USD 11m from the Bethesda, Maryland-based Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Foundation in support of its research on the discovery of therapeutics to treat patients with cystic fibrosis caused by nonsense mutations, the company said.
The CF Foundation brings extensive resources and expertise to the project and, additionally, has awarded Icagen up to USD 11m to support an integrated, multi-year drug discovery initiative.
Icagen expects to screen over 2m compounds as well as to leverage its silico drug discovery platform to interrogate an additional ten million virtual structures for molecules that suppress nonsense mutations. Through these efforts, Icagen intends to discover and evolve families of molecules that are suitable for clinical development.
Icagen specializes in the early stage of drug discovery to generate high-quality, advanced leads in multi-year, integrated drug discovery programmes.
Through both high throughput experimental and advanced computational approaches, the company creates innovative solutions that leverage an interplay of open discovery with the predictive potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Icagen is applying these approaches to its internal programs as well as toward its collaborations with external partners within the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry.