Heptares to extend leadership in GPCR-focused drug discovery and development

UK-based Heptares Therapeutics, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Japan’s Sosei Group (TYO Mothers Index: 4565), has announced an acquisition to expand its GPCR-focused drug discovery and development.

It has entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of G7 Therapeutics, a privately held drug discovery and development company based in Switzerland, for 12 million Swiss francs ($11.8 million) cash. The strategic acquisition broadens and strengthens Heptares’ intellectual property and platform for structure-based drug design and development focused on G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), a superfamily of receptors linked to a wide range of human diseases. The combination of Heptares’ and G7 Therapeutics’ platforms is anticipated to increase Heptares’ R&D productivity in terms of generating stabilized GPCRs and high quality GPCR structures that underpin discovery efforts for its proprietary pipeline and for partners.

G7 Therapeutics has developed proprietary approaches for stabilizing GPCRs (called SaBRE and CHESS), which are different and highly complementary to the StaR platform developed by Heptares. SaBRE and CHESS are of particular use where the target GPCR is present in very low numbers on cells and the methods are particularly powerful in the numbers of stabilizing mutations that can be identified in a short time for rapidly generating high quality GPCRs.