Bukwang Pharmaceutical Subsidiary Conterapharma Collaborates with AI Startup to Co-Develop RNA Therapeutics

[Asia Economy Reporter Jihee Kim] Contera Pharma, a subsidiary of Bukwang Pharmaceutical, announced on the 8th that it has signed a partnership with AI development startup 'Abzu' to develop nucleic acid-based new drugs.

Contera Pharma and Abzu, both based in Denmark, plan to use XAI to derive new drug candidates targeting two rare neurological disease treatments. According to a recent study published in the European Journal of Human Genetics, more than 300 million patients worldwide suffer from over 6,000 types of rare diseases. Although the risk of early death caused by these diseases is high, only 450 rare disease treatments have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Recently, nucleic acid-based new drug development, known as RNA therapeutics, has attracted attention as the next-generation new drug. This nucleic acid-based drug development is expected to enable treatment for patients with rare diseases, such as rare neurological disorders, which were previously untreatable.

Through this agreement, joint research on nucleic acid-based new drug development will be conducted based on Contera Pharma's expertise in neuroscience and drug discovery and Abzu's expertise in supercomputing and artificial intelligence. The two companies aim to jointly develop technologies for deriving and validating new drug candidates within this year so that Contera Pharma can rapidly advance nucleic acid-based new drug candidates to the clinical development stage. The company explained that this will significantly reduce the time and cost of discovering new drug candidates.

Kenneth Christensen, Chief Scientific Officer of Contera Pharma, said, "Combining Abzu's explainable AI technology with embedded RNA and related data resources and processing technologies can be an important cornerstone in achieving the development of innovative therapies that address unmet needs in the CNS field, which is Contera Pharma's core strategy. We will jointly develop a unique technology platform that can improve and accelerate clinical research of RNA therapeutics based on XAI, which is more advanced than our existing in-silico method of deriving candidate substances."

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