Excelra partners with HotSpot Therapeutics to enhance allosteric drug discovery efforts

HotSpot Therapeutics plans to deploy data from Excelra's flagship product GOSTAR toward select protein targets to augment its allosteric inhibitor candidate pipeline.

The partnership aims to enhance HotSpot's drug discovery and development efforts by incorporating GOSTAR's high-quality, annotated datasets into HotSpot's machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models.

With the integration of GOSTAR data, HotSpot will continue to advance the discovery and development of small molecule therapy candidates directed toward allosteric targets that have been difficult to drug or undruggable with traditional small molecule approaches.

GOSTAR provides a unique 3600 view of over 8 million small molecules and captures the most up-to-date view of the chemical space with information on chemical structures and their biological properties, including binding, in vitro, in vivo, ADME, toxicology, and physicochemical properties. The content in GOSTAR is meticulously curated with a proprietary QMS-ISO-certified process.

"Partnering with HotSpot Therapeutics allows for an exciting application of hit mining, as it combines AI/ML models and structure-based algorithms to accelerate both hit identification and chemical diversification in the field of allostery," said Norman Azoulay, Director of Scientific Products, Excelra.

"HotSpot's Smart AllosteryTM drug discovery platform has delivered a pipeline of small molecule inhibitor candidates directed toward difficult to drug or yet to be drugged targets in cancer and autoimmune disease," said Geraldine Harriman, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of HotSpot Therapeutics.

"Our partnership with Excelra has the potential to expand a portion of HotSpot's AI-enabled capabilities, allowing for the further advancement of our pipeline of targets with identified natural hotspots, as well as the design of novel allosteric modulators."

Excelra's data and digital insights empower innovation in life sciences from discovery to market. The Excelra edge comes from harmonizing heterogeneous data sets and applying innovative bioinformatics know-how and technologies to accelerate drug discovery and development with reliable and actionable insights.

Excelra's GOSTAR is available as an application for users to seek and discover compounds. In addition, it is offered via APIs and as a downloadable dataset to power in-house libraries and machine learning models.

For more information about GOSTAR, visit www.gostardb.com

HotSpot Therapeutics is targeting naturally occurring pockets on certain proteins that it refers to as "natural hotspots" that are decisive in controlling cellular protein function.

Largely unexploited by industry, these pockets have significant potential for drug discovery and provide for the systematic design of highly potent and selective small molecules that exhibit novel pharmacology.

The company's proprietary Smart Allostery platform utilizes computational approaches and AI-driven data mining of large and highly diverse data sets to identify natural hotspots, integrated with a tailored pharmacology toolkit and bespoke chemistry which the company believes will enable rapid delivery of superior hotspot-targeted small molecules.

HotSpot has established a pipeline of differentiated allosteric small molecules for the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases. To learn more, visit https://www.hotspotthera.com

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