To Establish a Platform for the Efficient and High-quality Drug Discovery Aiming to Resolve Social Issues by Reducing Medical Costs
On January 11th, IP Generator, Inc. (hereafter “IPG”), Axcelead, Inc. (hereafter “Axcelead”) and Axcelead Drug Discovery Partners, Inc. (hereafter “Axcelead DDP”) (those three companies are collectively called “Parties”) have signed a comprehensive business alliance agreement (hereafter “Agreement”). Under this Agreement, Parties aim to establish a healthcare platform for the efficient and high-quality drug discovery activities. IPG does not have any capital relationship with Axcelead and Axcelead DDP.
The purpose of this Agreement is to strengthen and expand the business foundation of the Parties. IPG will effectively utilize business networks, management resources, and drug discovery assets of Axcelead and Axcelead DDP, in order to select and develop promising research programs and license out them to pharmaceutical companies. For details, please refer to the next page titled, “Each company’s role in this alliance”.
In the pharmaceutical industry, it would be believed that the number of companies that promote business based on the concept of personalized medicine will increase in the future. As a result, the strategy of R&D aiming at providing patients with a small quantity of a wide variety of drugs to meet the individual medical needs would be mandatory. Thus, the value of the alliance among, IPG efficiently generating promising and innovative drug candidates, Axcelead enabling access to a variety of therapeutic modalities, and Axcelead DDP providing highest quality one-stop non-clinical drug discovery research services, would become higher and higher.
By collaborating among the Parties to build a next stage drug discovery platform, it would be possible to generate high quality innovative pharmaceuticals in a shorter period of time and lower cost. As for the pharmaceutical industry, the trend of the horizontal division of labor business model would be more accelerating. Parties strongly expect that this alliance would significantly contribute to solve the social issue by reducing healthcare costs in various countries and expand access of medicine globally.
[CONTACTS]
Axcelead ： contact@axcelead-hd.com
Axcelead DDP ： contact@axcelead.com
IPG : contact@ip-g.co.jp
Each company’s role in this alliance
[Role of IPG]
IPG was established on October 26th, 2021, as a 100% owned by the Healthcare New Platform Fund, operated by Whiz Partners Inc. (Minato-ku Tokyo, CEO: Atsushi Matsumura). IPG promotes R&D with the aim of acquiring precious intellectual property for the commercialization of new pharmaceuticals, such as composition of matter patents. Under the terms of this Agreement, IPG will effectively utilize business networks, management resources, and drug discovery assets of Axcelead and Axcelead DDP, in order to select and develop promising research programs and license out them to pharmaceutical companies. IPG will provide many opportunities to license in promising drug candidates at non-clinical stage for pharmaceutical companies with reasonably lower price than the industry standard at present. IPG will share a portion of revenue from licensees with Axcelead and Axcelead DDP.
The IPG plans to incorporate promising research programs not only from Axcelead but also from a wide range of global academic institutions and pharmaceutical companies.
[Role of Axcelead]
Axcelead is a holding company centered on Axcelead DDP, and a group of companies engaged in the healthcare platform business, including ARCALIS（https://corp.arcalis.co.jp/en）which operates Japan’s only one-stop mRNA contract development and manufacturing (CDMO) business, and PassPort Technologies (https://passport-tech.com/), which has next-generation transdermal drug delivery technology. Axcelead is currently working on the Druggable Target 1000 project, which was announced on December 2, 2021* in collaboration with FRONTEO Corporation, which uses AI to analyze the potential of target molecules in drug development. Under this agreement, Axcelead grants IPG the right to use this Druggable Target 1000 database. This will enable IPG to efficiently select promising target molecules.
*(https://www.axcelead-hd.com/?p=788)
[Role of Axcelead DDP]
Axcelead DDP is the first integrated drug discovery solution provider in Japan, which took over Takeda’s drug discovery platform business in July 2017. It has almost all the functions required for drug discovery and provides one-stop non-clinical drug discovery research services, from the search for drug targets to the optimization of drug candidate compounds, as well as in the bridging process to clinical development. Non-clinical R&D of the IPG Projects will be mainly contracted out to Axcelead DDP, IPG will utilize Axcelead DDP’s fully integrated high quality non-clinical R&D service platform.