NEW YORK – Tavros Therapeutics on Thursday said it has signed an agreement expanding its 2021 collaboration with OpenBench to identify novel small molecule modulators of up to five oncology targets.
Under the terms of the 18-month agreement, OpenBench will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and payment upon confirmation of molecules meeting Tavros' criteria, while Tavros will have exclusive access to OpenBench's structure-based machine learning screening platform for cancer targets.
Tavros uses high-throughput functional genomics to discover pathways relevant to cancer for development of drugs and predictive biomarkers. The Durham, North Carolina-based company partnered with Bayer subsidiary Vividion in October 2022 to identify new therapeutic targets in cancer and investigate whether they can be drugged with existing molecules. It also signed a deal with Zentalis in 2020 to develop oncology drug candidates.
"Complementing our next-generation synthetic lethality platform with OpenBench's success-driven AI chemistry approach brings additional innovation and speed to our work discovering and developing first-in-class cancer drugs," Tavros CEO and Cofounder Eoin McDonnel said in a statement.