Sirenas Awarded Grant to Identify Nature-Inspired Drug Leads for Neglected Diseases

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Sirenas, LLC today announced that it has received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to generate early therapeutic leads that show promise in treating neglected diseases including tuberculosis, malaria and cryptosporidium.

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 1 billion people — often among the world's poorest — suffer from one or more neglected diseases. Pharmaceutical companies typically do not pursue these diseases because it is difficult to recover the costs of developing and producing treatments. Because of this, charitable foundations and governments frequently bear the responsibility of supporting early development of these therapeutics.

"Funds from this grant will help us rapidly identify nature-inspired chemistry that shows promise in treating neglected diseases and enable efficient translation, including novel synthetic approaches, of the most exciting discoveries into leads for clinical development," said Eduardo Esquenazi, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Sirenas.

Since its founding, Sirenas has worked closely with research organizations across the globe to sustainably collect samples of marine organisms such as sponges, cyanobacteria and algae that provide valuable chemical diversity. Through these efforts, Sirenas has amassed a highly curated collection of thousands of nature-inspired molecules that can be interrogated for their therapeutic potential with the click of a button using Atlantis^TM, a proprietary machine learning data-mining technology. A highly talented group of chemists works alongside Atlantis to efficiently identify and translate the most promising discoveries in areas of unmet disease need.

"Marine organisms have evolved over hundreds of millions of years in highly competitive ecosystems, interacting with other organisms and creating complex symbiotic relationships," Dr. Esquenazi said. "As a result, these organisms develop chemistry that is far more diverse than what has evolved on land and it has the potential to lay a foundation for a broad assortment of highly impactful therapeutics."

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.

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