FORMA Therapeutics Announces Collaboration to Discover Inhibitors of Protein-Protein Interactions for Oncology

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FORMA Therapeutics announced today that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with Novartis. Under the terms of the agreement, FORMA will utilize its cell-based screening platform to discover inhibitors for undisclosed protein-protein interaction targets in the field of oncology. Financial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.

“This collaboration provides additional validation of our fully integrated drug discovery technologies, including our transformative biology and chemistry platforms, which we will use to unlock the elusive protein-protein interaction target class that is so important to oncology drug discovery.”

“FORMA is pleased to expand its relationship with Novartis beyond our existing agreement with the Novartis Option Fund,” said Steven Tregay, CEO of FORMA. “This collaboration provides additional validation of our fully integrated drug discovery technologies, including our transformative biology and chemistry platforms, which we will use to unlock the elusive protein-protein interaction target class that is so important to oncology drug discovery.”

About FORMA

FORMA Therapeutics is integrating transformative chemistry and biology to unlock the best targets and pathways that genomic medicine has revealed. Capitalizing on the targets and pathways validated by the Cancer Genome Atlas Project and other related efforts, FORMA is developing a new generation of cancer therapies aimed at previously elusive drug targets. The Company is achieving this by applying its proprietary cell-based screening, structure-guided drug discovery and Diversity Oriented Synthesis (DOS) technologies, which FORMA also uses to discover novel compounds for its partners in indications beyond oncology. FORMA is a global company headquartered in Cambridge, MA with additional research operations in Connecticut, Singapore and Beijing. www.formatherapeutics.com

About FORMA’s Integrated Drug Discovery Platform

FORMA is uniquely positioned through its unprecedented combination of technological capabilities and oncology expertise to access such novel target space and to develop a new generation of breakthrough oncology drugs. Some of the key features of FORMA’s discovery capabilities include:

• Versatile cell-based screening platform which allows the screening of discrete targets in cells and quantitative genome/proteome-wide profiling and target identification.

• Accessing new chemical space through structure guided drug discovery (SGDD) approaches leveraging proprietary computational and structural biology combined with our integrated chemistry platform which incorporates Diversity Orientated Synthesis (DOS). DOS combines the high stereochemical and structural diversity found in natural products with traditional combinatorial chemistry techniques. This approach has been proven to work for challenging targets and will allow the rapid optimization of lead therapeutic candidates.