Locus Pharmaceuticals Announces Focus on Drug Discovery Collaboration Business, Branded as Ansaris

BLUE BELL, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Locus Pharmaceuticals, a drug company that has developed its own internal and partnered pipeline, focusing on oncology, immunology, and inflammatory targets, today announced that in conjunction with a transformation to a drug discovery collaboration business model, it has created a new division, Ansaris, which will include most of its operations and personnel. Ansaris was formed to leverage the strengths and fully realize the value of Locus’ drug discovery computational platform and 10 years’ experience in integrated drug design, discovery, and development. Ansaris establishes collaborations and partnerships with companies seeking innovative solutions to drug design challenges.

"We adopted the name Ansaris to symbolize our differentiated approach to drug discovery, leveraging our demonstrated expertise in computational chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and our unique fragment-based drug discovery technology platform,” said Joan Lau, President of Ansaris. “The strength of the Ansaris discovery process lies not just with the technology, but also the integrated drug design team approach, uniquely customized for each project. We have effectively utilized our capabilities to deliver novel chemotypes for challenging targets for our internal pipeline, and now we will direct our successful discovery model toward delivering innovative preclinical candidates for our collaboration partners.”

About Ansaris Technology

Ansaris has developed and successfully applied a novel virtual fragment-based drug design (FBDD) platform into an integrated system for drug discovery. Driven by computational protein modeling and FBDD technology, Ansaris' technology supports rapid discovery of novel target-selective drug molecules. The technology platform is broadly applicable to many target classes including, but not limited to, kinases, proteases, and receptors. Drug design teams comprised of experienced computational and medicinal chemists utilize the suite of Ansaris computational tools to enable iterative and efficient transition of molecular designs from concept to synthesis and optimization.

About Locus

Locus is a privately held drug discovery and development biotechnology company in Blue Bell, PA that creates novel therapeutics using its patented drug design technology. It has entered into several drug discovery collaboration projects with pharmaceutical partners, and built a pipeline of early drug development assets for cancer and inflammatory indications.