IPGaia, Inc., (“IPG”) and University of California San Diego (“UC San Diego”), based in La Jolla, California, USA, have entered into a Master Collaborative Research and Development Agreement (“this agreement”) dated July 1st, 2022. This agreement establishes a formal framework for the incorporation of promising drug target leads from UC San Diego into IPG’s drug discovery platform.
Following UC San Diego’s strong history of partnering with industry to advance drug discovery, the program enables UC San Diego to propose drug targets to IPG for identification and development of lead compounds or modalities with the goal of licensing clinical development candidates to pharmaceutical companies.
For patients, personalized medicine holds great promise for the effective treatment and prevention of disease. For the pharmaceutical industry, personalized medicine provides the opportunity to achieve substantial clinical advances by tailoring treatments to the genes and personal circumstances that make every patient different.
The increasing ability to distinguish between molecular subtypes and individual variations of disease puts growing demand on R&D to provide a wide variety of drugs to meet the individual medical needs of small groups of patients. The smaller market size for highly personalized treatments requires increasingly efficient drug development.
In an effort to fast-track the development of highly personalized treatments that target known disease markers, IPG will invite global academia, pharmaceutical companies, and other entities to submit promising drug leads. This agreement between IPG and UC San Diego is considered to be a very significant step toward the accelerated incorporation of drug discovery seeds from academia. This is IPG’s fourth development agreement with academia.
“We are thrilled to enter into this unique international partnership with IPGaia to help accelerate the development of candidate compounds, data, or technologies for new drugs based on university innovations,” says Dr. Corinne Peek-Asa, vice chancellor for research at UC San Diego. “This partnership helps us ensure that our research has impact in improving lives as quickly as possible. Building on a foundation of over $1.5 billion in research expenditures per year, this agreement will provide new avenues for our faculty, staff, and students to advance research and entrepreneurship.”
“It is our great pleasure and honor to have this agreement with UC San Diego which is one of the top 15 research universities in the world with only academic medical center in San Diego.” Yasu Yamaguchi, Ph.D., President and CEO of IPG states. “This enables IPG to access to promising drug discovery seeds and to create highly innovative medicines. In this sense, IPG moves forward to contributing to solving the global social issues such as high healthcare costs and to extending the healthy life expectancy.”
[About IPG]
IPG was established on October 26, 2021, as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Healthcare New Platform Fund where Whiz. Partners Inc. (Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO: Atsushi Matsumura) has been the general partner. IPG will generate composition of matter patents for new chemical entities by conducting non-clinical research and development activities and make variety of transactions mainly with pharmaceutical companies. IPG has already concluded a comprehensive partnership agreement with Axcelead, Inc. and Axcelead Drug Discovery Partners, Inc. (http://ip-g.co.jp/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/0c91379ab46f05f47d691359e8e8c721.pdf) . 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. IPG plays a role as a platformer for creating pre-clinical stage innovative new medicines.
[About UC San Diego]
At the University of California San Diego, we embrace an inclusive culture of exploration and experimentation. Established in 1960, UC San Diego has been shaped by exceptional scholars who are not afraid to look deeper, challenge expectations and redefine conventional wisdom. As one of the top 15 research universities in the world and the only academic medical center in San Diego, we drive innovation and change to advance society, improve community health, propel economic growth and make our world a better place. Including FY 2022, for each of the past 13 fiscal years UC San Diego has exceeded $1 billion in sponsored research funding and research gifts. According to the 2021 Clarivate listing of Most Highly Cited Researchers, 51 UC San Diego faculty members and researchers were cited as among the most influential in their fields, placing UC San Diego 9th out of 1,300 research institutions globally in the listing.
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