Design Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Pharmaceutical ManufacturingMassachusetts, United States11-50 Employees

Design Pharmaceuticals applies robust ultra-high throughput bioscience technologies in a novel approach to dramatically accelerate GPCR drug discovery and outpace current industry capabilities. Our goal is to enable new treatments for patients suffering from diseases for which there are no satisfactory therapies.

GPCRs are the most common drug targets across all disease areas and account for approximately 30% of the therapeutic market. However, this market addresses only ca. 10% of all GPCRs. The advantage of our platform lies in our ability to harness broad and ultra-deep GPCR functional screening unlocking the blue sky to make novel therapeutics. Our platform technology is modality agnostic, ie screening small molecules, peptides, or antibody libraries. The assays can be run as agonist or antagonist assays, but most importantly, they identify hit candidates at an unprecedented scale and efficiency, increasing throughput 300-fold and reducing compound need 1000-fold. This is made possible by our unique cell-based multiplex GPCR screening platform, which enables the pooling of more than 300 cell lines representing hundreds of different GPCR drug targets, as our readout technology is based on NGS. This enables quantitative analysis of drug target function triggered by compounds while identifying potential off-target effects on other GPCR drug targets. At the same time, the platform is very flexible and can be adapted to include GPCR variants such as isoforms or mutant GPCR variants for drug function assays or SAR. Our discovery engine is complemented with cell-free synthesis for compound SAR and biologics libraries.

As a leading expert in droplet microfluidics, we are developing the future of GPCR screening. This will enable us to screen large complex libraries for hit candidates in millions of parallel assays and replace today's industry standard binding and affinity assays with deep exploration of drug space based on drug function assays in living cells.

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