Syntekabio Wins Contract for Disease Control Agency's New Infectious Disease Candidate Substance Discovery Project

Syntheca Bio will provide a novel infectious disease candidate compound discovery service to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) using its synthetic drug candidate discovery AI platform, ‘DeepMatcher’.

AI drug development specialist Syntheca Bio (CEO Jeong Jong-seon) announced on the 24th that it has secured a new project led by the National Institute of Health under the KDCA to respond to novel infectious diseases.

This project is a research initiative promoted by the KDCA with the aim of securing domestically produced therapeutics to respond to novel infectious diseases such as COVID-19. In May 2023, the KDCA selected eight novel infectious disease viruses (SFTS, Influenza, COVID-19, MERS, RSV, Lassa, Dengue, Nipah) that could cause national crises and announced a strategy to rapidly develop therapeutics capable of early control of infectious diseases.

Syntheca Bio will conduct optimization research on synthetic drug candidates and derivative activity improvement compounds targeting novel infectious diseases by utilizing its proprietary AI platform ‘DeepMatcher’ and supercomputing infrastructure.

Subsequently, the KDCA plans to validate and evaluate the efficacy of compounds derived using the AI platform, build a database, and use it as a foundation for developing therapeutics for novel infectious diseases that could cause future pandemics.

DeepMatcher is an AI drug platform that discovers drug candidates from a compound library of over one billion compounds. It virtually binds compounds to three-dimensional protein target structures to predict binding affinity and rapidly and accurately identify candidate compounds.

Jeong Jong-seon, CEO of Syntheca Bio, stated, “By securing this project, we expect to demonstrate the excellence of our AI drug platform technology in discovering therapeutics for novel infectious diseases in preparation for pandemics. We believe that the AI drug platform will significantly contribute to shortening the development period of future novel infectious disease therapeutics.”