Verily partners with Sosei Heptares to identify drug targets for immune-mediated disease

Verily, an Alphabet precision health company, is launching a research collaboration with Sosei Heptares to prioritize protein targets for therapeutic targeting in immune-mediated disease. This ambitious scientific effort is designed to accelerate the development of more effective treatment options for autoimmune and other diseases whose course is driven by the immune system. The agreement combines the complementary technology capabilities of Verily’s next generation immune mapping platform (Immune Profiler) and Sosei Heptares’ G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) structure-based drug design.

GPCRs represent an important class of pharmaceutical targets, and about one third of approved drugs have their mode of action through targeting GPCRs. However, only a small number of GPCRs have themselves been targeted, and hundreds of potential additional GPCR targets are encoded in the human genome, with a significant fraction expressed in the immune system. The primary goal of the collaboration is to leverage genetics and functional genomics to prioritize GPCR targets, and to bring the most compelling candidates into therapeutic development programs.

Clinical trial failures are in part due to poor target selection and the difficulty of identifying the best targets to be advanced into drug development. The partnership leverages the structure-based drug design platform capabilities of Sosei Heptares with Verily’s labs and advanced computational analysis techniques, which will be used to validate and prioritize multiple potential drug targets and novel drug candidates that modulate these targets. This is a strategic partnership that will utilize Verily’s Immune Profiler platform to advance the understanding of GPCR biology in immune cells, particularly as related to autoimmune disease, cancer, and other disorders where immune activation confers protection or promotes disease.

"At Verily, the Immune Profiler team has dedicated years of effort to building unique and robust lab and analytical capabilities that generate novel insights that can accelerate drug development. The strategic partnership with Sosei Heptares combines their excellence in drug development for GPCR targets with Immune Profiler’s target discovery engine, which is an important step in bringing insights that we are generating from our immune mapping work forward to patients."

About Verily's Immune Profiler
Immune Profiler is a sophisticated immune mapping platform developed in-house, which combines laboratory phenotyping and advanced computational analysis techniques to generate clinically actionable insights from high-resolution profiles of the immune system. By obtaining a more precise understanding of immune-mediated disease and partnering with drug developers, we aim to improve the management of disease through having more therapeutic options and knowing how to best deploy them.

For more information and partnership inquiries, contact us.