Viva Biotech and Schrödinger Announce Strategic Collaboration to Generate and Interrogate Structures for Unsolved Targets

Viva Biotech Holdings and Schrödinger, Inc. announced a strategic collaboration to expand the reach of structure-based drug discovery by generating de novo crystal structures of high-value targets.

Under the terms of the collaboration, Schrödinger will identify drug discovery targets for which there are currently no crystal structures in the public domain, including those that could lead to first-in-class therapeutic candidates for its internal pipeline. Viva Biotech will deploy X-ray crystallography designed to structurally enable these targets by generating high-resolution structures with bound ligands. Schrödinger will then leverage its advanced computational platform at scale to explore large portions of chemical space with the goal of designing novel therapeutic candidates for such targets.

“This collaboration brings together two leaders in the field of structure-based drug discovery,” said Zhixiong Ye, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer at Viva Biotech. “Our expertise in x-ray crystallography and in other key related areas enables us to generate de novo structures for previously unsolved targets. Schrödinger’s industry-leading platform enables broad and rapid exploration of chemical space. Together, we hope to create innovative therapeutics with the potential to benefit patients around the world.”

“This is an exciting collaboration. We have identified numerous promising targets that are challenging to drug in part because they lack high-resolution crystal structures. Viva Biotech is widely recognized as a world leader in x-ray crystallography, and we believe they will be able to generate high-quality structures that are amenable to our physics-based predictive modeling,” said Karen Akinsanya, Ph.D., Executive Vice President, Chief Biomedical Scientist and Head of Discovery R&D at Schrödinger. “We hope this collaboration will lead to the discovery of therapeutic candidates that can be advanced into human trials in areas with critical unmet medical needs.”