NEW YORK – Ono Pharmaceutical on Monday said it has begun searching for RNA sequences to serve as drug candidates as part of a research collaboration with Jorna Therapeutics.
Osaka, Japan-based Ono and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Jorna late last year entered into a drug discovery research collaboration, under which Ono would use Jorna's RNA-editing platform. Since then, Ono has validated Jorna's platform, which it will now use to identify drug targets in the hopes of developing new RNA-editing therapeutics.
Under the terms of this deal, Ono will have an exclusive option to discover, develop, and commercialize worldwide drug candidates using RNA-editing drug sequences designed by Jorna. Ono has paid an undisclosed upfront payment to Jorna, which is also eligible for milestone payments based on research progress.
Ono will also pay for research funding for the collaboration.
"We highly value Jorna's unique generative AI technologies, which combine large-scale amino acid sequence information and language models to design desired proteins," Seishi Katsumata, executive director of discovery and research at Ono, said in a statement. "Through this partnership, we aim to accelerate drug development using RNA-editing technology and provide new treatment options to patients around the world with unmet medical needs."
Jorna's platform aims to introduce mutations to reach previously inaccessible target RNAs. As part of the collaboration, the company will design sequences using its proprietary protein and RNA generative artificial-intelligence model, which analyzes interatomic interactions within and between proteins and small molecules to identify and create sequences.