CytoReason and Pfizer enter collaboration over drug discovery

CytoReason has entered into a collaboration agreement with Pfizer over its machine learning model for drug discovery. 

The agreement is said to bring multimillion-dollar benefits to CytoReason for technology access fees, research support and success-based payments, and Pfizer will use CytoReason’s cell-centred models of the immune system.

Michael Vincent, chief scientific officer, inflammation & immunology at Pfiizer said: “We believe that CytoReason’s platform has the potential to offer valuable insights that may be applied to our research into the human immune system. Leveraging technologies such as this can help us understand disease and prioritize targets, and support our mission of bringing innovative new therapies to patients who need them.”

CytoReason’s proprietary platform helps rebuild lost cellular information from gene expression data and associates genes to specific cells. This information is then integrated with additional omics and literature data to create a cell-based model of the trial-specific immune response.

David Harel, CEO of CytoReason said: “The collaboration with Pfizer will further strengthen our models in our core therapeutic areas. This will be our fifth major partnership, which we believe will help make our model unparalleled in its accuracy for assets across the pipeline. CytoReason’s model brings together thousands of samples on a cell-protein-gene level, allowing for fast and accurate insights.”