BRIEF—Sosei and Verily collaboration

7 January 2022

Japan-based Sosei Group and the life sciences arm of Google-parent company Alphabet, USA-based Verily, have entered into a strategic research collaboration.

The research agreement brings together the complementary capabilities of Verily’s immune profiling and Sosei Heptares’ G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) structure-based drug design.

The collaboration aims to:

Advance the understanding of GPCR biology in immune cells, particularly in the fields of immunology, gastroenterology, immuno-oncology and other disorders with immunoprotective or immunopathogenic mechanisms;
Prioritize and validate GPCR targets with strong potential as drug targets; and
Discover and develop novel drug candidates that modulate these targets

Verily’s proprietary Immune Profiler is a next generation immune mapping platform that combines high-resolution molecular phenotyping performed in Verily’s labs and advanced computational analysis techniques to generate insights into immune system functions.

It will be used to identify GPCR targets that represent new opportunities to modulate immune cell function and ameliorate disease pathology.