PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Iktos, a company specialized in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for new drug design today announced a collaboration agreement with Ono Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd., a leading pharmaceutical company based in Japan with a focus on innovative medicines dedicated to the fight against disease and pain.

Under the agreement, Iktos will apply its de novo ligand and structure-based generative modelling technologies and software Makya™, its AI-based retrosynthesis analysis and planning tool Spaya™, and know-how complementing Ono’s drug discovery capabilities to expedite the identification of potential pre-clinical candidates and to identify additional novel chemical matter with suitable properties for undisclosed Ono’s drug discovery programmes. ONO will acquire exclusive worldwide rights to develop and commercialize small molecule compounds discovered in the collaboration. Iktos will receive research funding plus milestone payments based on achievement of certain milestones. Ono scientists will benefit from direct access to Iktos Makya™ and Spaya™ software platforms as part of the collaboration.

Iktos’s AI technology, based on deep generative models, helps to bring new insights and directions into the drug discovery process based on a comprehensive data-driven chemical structure generation technology. The technology automatically designs virtual novel molecules with all the characteristics of a successful drug molecule. This approach, validated through multiple collaborations, is a novel solution to one of the key challenges in drug design: rapid identification of molecules that simultaneously satisfy multiple parameters, such as potency, selectivity, safety, and project-specific properties. This approach uniquely enables the exploration of chemical space and produces innovative molecule designs with optimized properties. Iktos makes its AI technology available to its customers both through research collaborations and through direct access to its SaaS platforms Makya™ for de novo design and Spaya for synthesis planning.

"We are very pleased to collaborate with Ono, a leading pharmaceutical company based in Japan, and proud to announce our first collaboration deal with a Japanese pharma company," said Yann Gaston-Mathé, Co-founder and CEO of Iktos. “Our ultimate objective is to expedite drug discovery and achieve time and cost efficiencies for our collaborators by using Iktos’s proprietary AI platform and know-how. We are confident that together we will be able to identify promising novel chemical matter and solve complex multiparametric optimisation problems for Ono’s drug discovery programmes. We are committed to tackle challenging problems alongside our collaborators where we can demonstrate value generation for new and on-going drug discovery projects.”

“Iktos has excellent artificial intelligence technology and platform in drug discovery,” said Toichi Takino, Senior Executive Officer / Executive Director, Discovery & Research of Ono. “Through this drug discovery collaboration, we are excited to work with Iktos to identify and develop the next generation of innovative treatments, leading to further expansion of our development pipeline.”

About Iktos
Incorporated in October 2016, Iktos is a start-up company specializing in the development of artificial intelligence solutions applied to chemical research, more specifically medicinal chemistry and new drug design. Iktos is developing a proprietary and innovative solution based on deep learning generative models, which enables, using existing data, the design of molecules that are optimized in silico to meet all the success criteria of a small molecule discovery project. The use of Iktos technology enables major productivity gains in upstream pharmaceutical R&D. Iktos offers its technology both as professional services and as a SaaS software platform, Makya™. Iktos is also developing Spaya™, a synthesis planning software based upon Iktos’s proprietary AI technology for retrosynthesis.

More information on: http://www.iktos.ai/

About Ono Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd.
Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., headquartered in Osaka, is an R&D-oriented pharmaceutical company committed to creating innovative medicines in specific areas. Ono focuses its research on the oncology, immunology, neurology and specialty research with high medical needs as priority areas for discovery and development of innovative medicines. For further information, please visit the company's website at https://www.ono-pharma.com/.

Contacts

Yann Gaston-Mathé (CEO) – contact@iktos.com - +33 6 30 07 99 26