Aptamer Group and Valitacell to develop new drug discovery platform

Biotechnology companies Aptamer Group and Valitacell are working together to develop a next-generation screening platform for drug development, the companies have announced.

Aptamer Group will work alongside Valitacell to engineer the platform, which will utilise short sequences of DNA or RNA called aptamers alongside Valitacell’s high throughput screening processes.

Screening processes are essential to drug development programmes as they can help identify promising molecules that can be developed into new therapeutic drugs.

Aptamers are particularly useful in this process because they can be designed to bind to molecules with specific properties. They can also be engineered to fluoresce when binding takes place, enabling these molecules to be rapidly identified from large batches.

The drug discovery process can be particularly time consuming and expensive for pharmaceutical companies. Many thousands of synthetic and natural molecules need to be screened to identify a small handful with promising properties that can be taken forward for further testing – and it can take between 12 and 15 years before one new marketable drug emerges from this process.

Arron Tolley, CEO of Aptamer Group, said: “The platform we are co-developing with Valitacell will enable the most promising molecules to be identified for use in drug development programmes. This will enable pharmaceutical companies to focus resources and accelerate new drugs into the market.”

Jerry Clifford, CEO of Valitacell, said: “We are really excited about this partnership with the Aptamer Group, specifically in terms of the potential extension of targets that can be accessed with our platform technology. Valitacell looks forward to a long and fruitful relationship”The companies’ partnership has been signed for 20 years with the first product expected within 12 months.