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By
Tyler Golato
Feb 10, 2020

Molecule and Arctoris announce partnership to tackle the innovation crisis in drug development.

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The pharmaceutical industry is facing a wide variety of challenges, but perhaps the most pressing is the ongoing innovation crisis. Drug discovery rates are declining, the price of bringing a drug to market is increasing, and ROI on R&D is expected to hit 0% in the next few years. Taken together, these factors have a direct impact on the number and types of therapeutics being brought to market. In light of the capital requirements being so high, drug discovery represents a special challenge for its actors, especially pharmaceutical and biotech companies and universities. Compounding these problems, industry and academia struggle with an unprecedented reproducibility crisis. Today, two innovative companies have joined forces to fight these trends.

Arctoris (https://arctoris.com/), a technology company that designed and built a fully automated research facility based in Oxford (UK), where robotics perform a range of the most frequent drug discovery assays for researchers worldwide, has announced a formal partnership with Molecule (https://molecule.to/), a company aiming to create an open ecosystem for collaborative drug development. Molecule works by offering fractional ownership in pharmaceutical IP in exchange for preclinical or clinical development work, as well as funding. The companies aim to make drug development more democratic, collaborative, and efficient in the interest of bringing higher-quality therapeutics to patients faster.

Arctoris allows researchers and biotech entrepreneurs to design and remotely execute advanced cell-based, molecular biology and biochemical assays and experiments. They offer a complete system to generate, analyze and visualize research data in a secure cloud environment, leveraging the benefits of robotic experimentation, and provide full transparency, precision, and consistency in preclinical R&D. Using the Arctoris system, researchers worldwide enjoy accelerated progress in their research, making discoveries faster and more efficiently, whilst being liberated from manual work.

“Drug discovery researchers worldwide face enormous challenges posed by a widespread lack of reproducibility and the limited availability of standardized, structured, high quality data. The use of robotics can mitigate these challenges and enable researchers to produce data of unprecedented quality and accuracy, accelerating the drug discovery process,” said Martin-Immanuel Bittner, MD DPhil, Co-Founder and CEO of Arctoris.

Automated experimentation makes the drug discovery process faster, cheaper, and more reliable. Precise automation, encompassing capture of data and its storage in a secure and structured form, provides a powerful combination that is in line with the recent trend towards data-driven drug discovery. Together with Molecule’s distributed research platform, which enables stakeholders in drug development to collaborate and share ownership in the IP they are working to develop, Arctoris and Molecule have positioned themselves to make critical strides towards making drug development faster, cheaper, less risk-prone, and more viable at all levels.

Arctoris and Molecule have joined forces to develop use cases that combine their technologies to create a modular pipeline for distributed therapeutics development in the longevity space, a pipeline in which they will involve universities, CROs, patient advocacy groups, small pharmas & biotechs, as well as investors. Shares in intellectual property or direct funding (a fee-for-service) will be provided to stakeholders that participate in the development of therapeutics.

About Arctoris Ltd
Arctoris Ltd is an Oxford-based research company that is revolutionizing drug discovery for biote companies, pharmaceutical corporations and academia. Arctoris has established the world’s first fully automated drug discovery platform, offering pre-optimized and fully validated R&D processes for its partners and customers globally. Accessible remotely, the platform provides on-demand access to a wide range of biochemical, cell biology and molecular biology assays conducted by robotics, enabling rapid, informed decision-making in basic biology, target validation, toxicology, and phenotypic screening. These assay capabilities are accessed using a powerful online portal that streamlines experiment planning, ordering, tracking, and data analysis. Thanks to the Arctoris platform, customers can rapidly, accurately and cost-effectively perform their research and advance their drug discovery programs.