Novartis Joins Ensemble To Develop An Oral IL-17 Blocker
This article was originally published in The Pink Sheet Daily
Executive Summary
Novartis is the latest big pharma to partner with Ensemble to develop oral small molecules against traditional biologic targets. Novartis will develop Ensemble’s synthetic macrocycle drug targeting IL-17, a pathway the big pharma knows well.
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Ensemble Therapeutics Corp.
Ensemble Therapeutics Corp. believes that its large-scale libraries of chemicals with macrocyclic structures will yield worthy drug candidates and ultimately marketable therapeutics. The hefty size of macrocyclic compounds is the key characteristic that Ensemble is banking on. Whereas small molecules generally interact with their targets by binding to them, Ensemble thinks macrocycles will be big enough to spread across the surface of disease-relevant proteins and so physically disrupt interactions that smaller molecules are too weak to influence. If so, macrocycles could hit targets that only protein therapeutics can address now, and potentially do so orally.