Per the agreement, Pcovery’s dedicated full time equivalent (FTE) team will gain access to Enamine’s inventory of building blocks. IP produced as part of the collaboration will belong solely to Pcovery.
“Pcovery is in need of highly skilled organic synthesis chemists who can deliver on the stakeholder expectation of moving the antifungal program forward rapidly,” Michael Bossert, Head of Strategic Alliances at Enamine, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.
The goal of the collaboration is to develop a new antifungal compound for invasive fungal infections, a life-threatening situation which Bossert said kills more than 1.5 million world-wide each year.
“Pcovery tests all the compounds prepared at Enamine in a range of biological assays in order to do the final ADMET optimization before a clinical candidate is nominated expectedly 1-1.5 years from now,” he explained.
Currently, there's only three known drug classes used to fight fungal infections and as resistant strains replace susceptible fungal strains, Bossert said there's an urgent need for new antifungals working via new mechanisms.
“Pcovery's program is focusing on development of a small-molecule fungal inhibitor which has exceptional high broad spectrum activity including activity against common and less-common resistant strains without resistance development,” he added.
Building on an existing relationship
According to the company, the basis of the relationship is “the recognition of an established and well-reputed company.”
“Pcovery set very high quality criteria and have frequent collaboration evaluations, both on efficacy measures and shipping times but also on inventiveness, turn-around of new ideas, change-management, and a high degree of self-reliance,” added Bossert.
He explained the collaboration combines good infrastructure, fast access to chemicals in large quantities at Enamine and, importantly, “the assignment of a very competent project leader.”
“The personal interaction with a hard-working and dedicated project leader meeting deadlines creates trust over time,” Bossert said. “If a partnership or collaboration doesn't work out Pcovery will move on.”