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06/05/2020 - Press release

The FDA licenses Chemotargets CLARITY platform

Chemotargets -a global leader in the development of intelligence platforms and drug design prediction, headquartered in the Barcelona Science Park- has signed a license agreement for its CLARITY^® platform with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to provide adverse event predictions and mechanistic investigation in public health risk assessments of new drug applications and existing marketed products.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) has licensed the Chemotargets CLARITY^® platform for predicting unknown secondary targets for new molecules of pharmaceutical interest.

This contract is meant to directly address the FDA's requirement for a computational method which can predict potential molecular targets from chemical structure and provide a user-friendly environment for analysis of results. Molecular targets identified with high confidence by CLARITY® may be evaluated by FDA/CDER for their association with adverse events, addiction liability, or their association with disease within the specified indication(s).

A previous collaboration with FDA/CDER focused on predicting on-target and off-target activities using known in vitro pharmacology data for small molecules and associating them with drug safety data coming from post-marketing spontaneous reports. A tangible outcome of the collaboration between FDA/CDER and Chemotargets has been the incorporation of CLARITY® as part of the FDA's Public Health Assessment via Structural Evaluation (PHASE) initiative for assessing the abuse risk that new drugs could pose to public safety (Clin. Pharmacol. Ther. 2019, 106, 116-122 and PLoS ONE 2020, 15, e0229646).

Dr Jordi Mestres, Chemotargets founder and Head of the Systems Pharmacology Lab at IMIM. (Photo: ©Barcelona Science Park).

Chemotargets CLARITY^® (which was awarded the Seal of Excelence from the European Commission) uses artificial intelligence on carefully-curated data to connect molecules, protein targets, safety events, and therapeutic indications with the help of state-of-the-art analytics tools. Beyond a knowledge-based source that can be interrogated from any discovery angle, the platform can be used to identify the probable primary and secondary targets of small molecules and their predicted metabolites by rapidly profiling through consensus ligand-based models of 4,799 proteins built from affinity data for almost 3 million small molecules.

In addition, machine learning models of 1,278 safety endpoints were constructed from data carefully extracted from almost 16 million spontaneous reports, including hundreds of safety-related mechanisms annotated with preclinical toxicity and clinical safety issues.

Chemotargets was founded in March 2006 by Dr. Jordi Mestres as a spin-off from the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), a leading health research institute based in Barcelona (Spain). Chemotargets offers validated and cutting-edge computational methodologies with top market predictive performance. The innovation strategy of the company is driven by new methods generated at Dr Mestres' Systems Pharmacology Lab.

The Prous Institute for Biomedical Research has made a strategic investment in Chemotargets which has allowed CLARITY^? product development to be accelerated and new capabilities to be acquired in order to support the company's vision and quickly address customer needs. The company also has the advice and support of GENESIS Biomed, a well-established consultancy firm in the health and biotech sectors, and CREA Inversión, an M&A boutique advisory firm specialised in corporate transactions and financing.

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