Website: Sosei Heptares 

General description
Sosei Heptares is an international biopharmaceutical group focused on the design and development of new medicines originating from its proprietary GPCR-targeted StaR® technology and Structure-Based Drug Design platform capabilities (https://www.soseiheptares.com). Sosei Heptares is advancing a broad and deep pipeline of partnered and in-house drug candidates in multiple therapeutic areas including neurology, immuno-oncology, gastroenterology, inflammation and rare/specialty diseases. Partners and collaborators include AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Genentech, Takeda, Allergan, Pfizer, Novartis, PeptiDream, Kymab, Daiichi-Sankyo, MorphoSys and Fujifilm. Sosei Heptares is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, with state-of-the-art R&D facilities in Cambridge, UK. Sosei Heptares is a world-leader in stabilizing G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). Our patent-protected technologies enable unique structural insights into GPCRs as drug targets. As such, we have the ability and the know-how to design new therapeutic agents with optimized pharmacology using Structure-Based Drug Design (SBDD). Our approach delivers drug candidates with improved physicochemical properties, as well as the potential for enhanced safety and efficacy profiles, and could reduce clinical attrition rates.

Key research facilities, infrastructure and equipment
Sosei Heptares maintains cutting edge facilities that enable leveraging of its deep GPCR expertise and fully-integrated drug discovery platform. The presence of all facets of modern drug discovery from molecular biology to translational sciences and development, and access to state-of-the-art facilities (incl. computer-aided drug design (CADD) labs, computational 3D design laboratory, GPU & CPU clusters, synthesis labs, biochemical and biophysical screening platform, protein production and protein crystallization facilities) have enabled Sosei Heptares to become a world leader in its field. Computational Chemistry and Cheminformatics capabilities involve unique customised CADD software solutions for GPCR Structure-Based Drug Design.

Key persons and expertise

Dr. Chris de Graaf – Head of Computational Chemistry Sosei Heptares since 2018, after 9 years Ass. Prof. Computational Medicinal Chemistry at VU University Amsterdam (incl. supervision 6 PhD students), experience in computational chemistry, structural cheminformatics, and computer-aided drug discovery and design.

Dr. Francesca Deflorian – Senior Scientist II Computational Chemistry Sosei Heptares with 13+ years drug discovery experience (including 3 years NIH, 10 years Heptares) in computer-aided drug design technologies, including allosteric GPCR binding site modeling, molecular dynamics approaches for binding kinetics prediction, and free energy perturbation simulations for GPCR structure-based drug design.

Dr. Alicia Higueruelo – Principal Scientist Computational Chemistry Sosei Heptares, with 20+ years drug discovery experience (including GSK, De Novo Pharmaceuticals, UCB, Univ Cambridge, CCDC (incl. co-supervision 2 PhD students), Charles River, Sosei Heptares) in computer-aided drug design technologies, including structural bioinformatics/chemogenomics database development.