Cyclica Announces Ligand Express Academic Polypharmacology (LEAP) Program under Cyclica Academic Partnership Program (CAPP)

TORONTO, ON, CANADA (August 1, 2018) –  Cyclica Inc. is pleased to announce the inaugural Ligand Express Academic Polypharmacology (LEAP) Program under the Cyclica Academic Partnership Program (CAPP). 

Cyclica recently launched its official academic partnership program – CAPP – whereby Cyclica will be supporting revolutionary research with its Drug Discovery Program. LEAP is the first initiative under Cyclica’s Academic Partnership Program and is open to principal investigators at academic institutions and non-profit organizations around the globe. Successful applicants will be granted 90-day access to Cyclica’s AI-assisted, structure-based, molecular simulation platform, Ligand Express™, to support their drug discovery research. During the access period, researchers can submit up to five small molecules to rapidly generate unique polypharmacology profiles through www.ligandexpress.com. Structures with the molecules co-crystallized with the protein are not required. The polypharmacological profiles consist of on- and off-target interactions that may be expected, as well as those that are unanticipated, to drive their research insights. A short demo of Ligand Express™ can be found here.

In addition, successful applicants will have the opportunity to use Cyclica’s new proprietary ADMET prediction tools, which have shown to reliably outperform traditional supervised learning techniques, to analyze submitted molecules. A validation note outlines Cyclica’s ADMET prediction performance and describes some distinguishing features of the technology. Among the shortlisted awardees, the top two projects assessed by Cyclica’s adjudication team will be provided with downstream in vitro binding assays. The application to the LEAP award program is now open to researchers internationally and will close on September 30, 2018. For more information about the LEAP award, please click here.

Naheed Kurji, Cyclica’s President and CEO, commented on the motivations behind the program, “We have benefited greatly from partnerships with some of the best academic institutions in North America. As a means of giving back and broadening our collaboration with researchers globally, we want to make CAPP a program dedicated to driving value to the academic community. LEAP will be the first initiative that encourages the brightest minds in academia to leverage our technologies in their research. I cannot wait to see exciting research collaborations that LEAP is about to initiate.”