Development Fund to Boost Search for Drugs to Modulate Nuclear Hormone Receptors

A project to develop novel small molecule retinoic acid related orphan receptor (ROR) modulators that target TH17 T-lymphocytes for the treatment of various autoimmune disorders including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, and COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) will be funded by a consortium of private investors.

The beneficiary of the development fund, Visionary Pharmaceuticals (San Diego, CA, USA), has created “BindingSIGHTs”, a proprietary computational technology platform, which encompasses an advanced suite of structural biology and chemical informatic tools. BindingSIGHTs enables sophisticated virtual screening and structure-based drug design for challenging molecular drug targets. In addition, the company has created the “MANIFOLD” virtual compound library of more than 22 million compounds, which have been screened against ROR BindingSIGHTs fingerprints.

These tools are part of an innovative drug discovery engine that was created to focus on nuclear hormone receptors. Nuclear hormone receptor modulators represent 15% of all drugs approved in the United States and account for more than $27 billion in annual sales.

“Our BindingSIGHTs technology and MANIFOLD library enables us to save both time and money in generating the best possible lead series. With the initial seed round investments we are now able to launch full-scale research activities in our state-of-the-art labs,” said Dr. Gordon Alton, president and CEO of Visionary Pharmaceuticals. “We have assembled a veteran leadership team with proven expertise in driving novel therapies to IND (investigational new drug). Additionally, our Board of Directors and Scientific Advisory Board bring us a depth of industry experience in successfully driving high quality drug discovery and development programs and delivering high-value exits. Collectively this experience has resulted in more than a dozen novel drugs either marketed or in clinical trials.”

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Visionary Pharmaceuticals