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Standigm Inc., the leading workflow artificial intelligence (AI) drug discovery company, announced that the company had established a Synthetic Research Center in the headquarters of SK Chemicals Co., Ltd, a life science and green chemicals company.
Standigm has dramatically improved the R&D productivity of AI drug discovery process with its own standardized and automated AI technologies and now runs a total 42 of new drug candidate projects. One of these projects, which is about Standigm’s AI-driven drug candidate for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (“NASH”), is expected to enter a clinical research collaboration with SK Chemicals.
The establishment of the Synthetic Research Center will not only strengthen the company’s research infrastructure to prepare the increase of new drug discovery projects, but also improve productivity in compound synthesis, which is the rate-determining step of AI drug discovery projects. As the Synthetic Research Center is located within SK Chemicals’ Research Center, Standigm will jointly use various equipment and facilities owned by SK Chemicals.
“The establishment of the Synthetic Research Center will help us make our drug discovery process more efficient by covering a wide range of R&D processes of our research projects from compound design to synthesis,” said Hanjo Kim, Head of the Standigm Synthesis Research Center. “The Standigm Synthesis Research Center differs from traditional pharmaceutical and chemical laboratories in that we have the unique way of organic synthesis research powered by our proprietary AI technologies,” he added.
Standigm and SK Chemicals have been collaborating on several joint research projects using Standigm’s AI platform since July 2019. They signed a strategic investment (SI) contract in June this year for the research collaboration on Standigm’s NASH drug and the establishment of the Synthetic Research Center.
“We expect the Standigm’s Synthetic Research Center in the headquarters of SK chemicals will help the two companies to work more closely together,” said Soomin Lee, Leader of Open R&D Task Force (TF) Team, SK Chemicals. “We will continue to make efforts to promote the collaborative projects with Standigm successfully,” he added.
About Standigm
Standigm is a workflow AI-driven drug discovery company headquartered in Seoul, South Korea and subsidized in Cambridge, UK. Standigm has proprietary AI platforms encompassing novel target identification to compound design, to generate commercially valuable drug pipelines. Founded in 2015, Standigm has established an early stage drug discovery workflow AI to generate multiple First-in-Class compounds within seven months. Pursuing full-stack, AI-driven industrializing drug discovery, Standigm has achieved the automation of molecular design workflow, and the automation effort has been expanding to the whole drug discovery process based on Standigm AI platforms, including Standigm ASK™ for novel target discovery, Standigm BEST™ for novel compound generation.
About SK Chemicals
SK Chemicals was established in 1969 as Sunkyong Synthetic Textiles and has since undergone ceaseless change and innovation to become the chemicals & life science company that represents Korea today. SK Chemicals’ life sciences business is dominated by pharmaceuticals and biologics and is aimed at providing comprehensive healthcare solutions that cover patient care from diagnosis to treatment and prevention. SK Chemicals successfully developed the first new drug in Korea, Sunpla®, in 1999, thereby opening up a new chapter in the field of synthetic new medicines. The company established a competitive product portfolio in the pharmaceutical field with the consecutive launches of MVIX®, an erectile dysfunction treatment, and MVIX S®, a film-type erectile dysfunction treatment. In addition to its first new natural medicine Joins, SK Chemicals boasts a diverse line of medicines including the arthritis treatment patch, Trast® and blood circulation improvement agent, Ginexin®.
