Astellas, Tokyo Institute of Technology sign joint research agreement

The joint research aims to contribute to the drug discovery to treat diseases caused by protozoan parasites, such as leishmaniasis, chagas disease and sleeping sickness in neglected tropical diseases.

According to the agreement, a research group at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo-Tech and Astellas will cooperate in drug discovery for the treatment of diseases caused by protozoan parasites.

In the two step research, the first step includes data mining of public information such as patents and published articles to obtain the knowledge about the drug discovery for the treatments for diseases caused by protozoan parasites.

In-silico screening will be performed to identify compounds which are predicted to have anti-protozoan activities, in the second step.

Tokyo-Tech will be responsible for data mining and for in-silico screening calculations of commercially available compounds while Astellas will be responsible for preparing input data for data mining, selecting, and listing of compounds to be evaluated based on the in-silico screening calculations.