Heptares Therapeutics said today it has agreed to acquire G7 Therapeutics for CHF 12 million ($11.8 million) in a deal designed to strengthen the buyer’s intellectual property and platform for structure-based drug design and development focused on G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs).
Heptares reasons that the combined company will boost its R&D productivity by generating more stabilized GPCRs and high-quality GPCR structures that can underpin drug-discovery efforts for its own pipeline and for collaboration partners.
G7’s SaBRE and CHESS approaches for stabilizing GPCRs will complement Heptares’ StaR® platform, the buyer said, adding that SaBRE and CHESS have proved especially useful where the target GPCR is present in very low numbers on cells.
The methods are expected to prove particularly powerful in helping identify a number of stabilizing mutations in a short time for rapidly generating high-quality GPCRs, Heptares added.
Upon completion of the acquisition, G7 Therapeutics will be renamed Heptares Zurich and become a wholly owned, Zurich-based subsidiary of Heptares. The subsidiary will be led by Fiona Marshall, who holds CSO positions at Heptares and its parent company Sosei Group.
“We believe that the platform G7 has developed is truly complementary to our StaR platform and will expand our capacity to explore more of the ‘GPCRome’ to deliver novel candidates against targeted GPCRs for both our proprietary pipeline and for partnered programs,” Marshall said in a statement.
Sosei CEO Peter Bains said the acquisition will advance Sosei’s strategy of consolidating and building on Heptares’ strength in targeting GPCRs and expanding its capacity to generate a sustainable pipeline of new drug candidates.
