Sirenas and Calibr to Form Drug Discovery Collaboration

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Sirenas, LLC and the California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr) today announced that they are collaborating in an effort to discover and develop small molecules in oncology, neuroscience, regenerative medicine and neglected disease. Sirenas will provide Calibr with access to its marine-derived chemical diversity, Atlantis^TM data mining technology, and synthetic chemistry expertise. Calibr will evaluate compounds in a series of novel biological assays and preclinical disease models. 

"Sirenas has combined the rich chemical diversity found in marine organisms with enabling analytics and informatics to create a powerful platform that we believe could be valuable in targeting some of the most intractable disease phenotypes," said Pete Schultz, President and CEO of Calibr. "We are delighted to pair the tools and expertise we have developed at Calibr with Sirenas' technology to tackle unmet public health needs."

"Marine organisms have evolved over hundreds of millions of years in highly competitive environments, which has allowed them to evolve very diverse, potent chemistry," said Eduardo Esquenazi, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Sirenas. "In the past, the challenges of identifying and translating those compounds has hindered their pursuit, but we have focused on building an approach that can quickly and cost effectively bring forth these novel compounds into new avenues of drug discovery research. The collaboration with Calibr provides significant biological capabilities to better understand how our compounds work against a number of disease targets."

Financial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed, but the parties plan to co-develop promising leads through definitive preclinical and early clinical studies.

About Sirenas

Sirenas aims to sustainably and efficiently identify, catalogue and translate the high-value chemical diversity of the ocean to address unmet medical needs. Sirenas has uniquely combined marine chemical diversity with its Atlantis™ proprietary data mining technology and next-generation synthetic chemistry to create a fully integrated, rapid and validated approach to drug discovery. Sirenas has a pipeline of novel ADC payloads and has recently expanded into the discovery and development of first-in-class small molecule therapeutics focusing on immuno-oncology and the tumor microenvironment. Sirenas is headquartered in San Diego and has a presence at JLABS San Diego. For more information about Sirenas, please visit www.SirenasMD.com.

About The California Institute for Biomedical Research

The California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr) is an independent not-for-profit institute established in 2012 with the goal of accelerating the translation of basic research to new medicines that address unmet medical needs. Collaborations with researchers across the world expedite the translation of basic biomedical findings to new candidate therapeutics, while enabling commercial partnerships which are formed to bring these new medicines to the public.  Value created from these activities is reinvested in preclinical and clinical research at the institute to create a self-sustaining, 'evergreen' model for not-for-profit biomedical research.

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