When other firms are arguing the importance of chemically biased libraries and proteomics firms are retooling their business models to address a lack of adequate funding, NeoGenesis Pharmaceuticals is doubling down its bets on the company's "let the biology be damned" approach to identifying compounds. Money from the firm's existing deal flow covers 70-80% of the company's total cash outlays, including the 40-50% of overall spending attributed to internal drug development projects. NeoGenesis' hook: it takes proteins merely associated with disease and applies its methodologies to pick compounds that show high affinity and selectivity to the target, irrespective of the target's function. The strategy doesn't change the criteria for a good drug, but re-organizes the process to push downstream the need to address complex questions of biology.
NeoGenesis Pharmaceuticals Inc.
maintains its own kind of bias. At a time when other firms, such as
Exelixis Pharmaceuticals Inc., are arguing the importance of
chemically biased libraries—collections of chemicals skewed
towards specific biologies—NeoGenesis is doubling down its
bets on the company's "let the biology be damned" (at least
up-front) approach to identifying compounds.
Big Pharma, notably Pfizer Inc. , is also championing biased libraries as a discovery tool. (See "The Foundations of...
