Ensemble Discovery announces name change to Ensemble Therapeutics Corporation

Jun 22 2010

Ensemble Discovery today announced that it will begin operating as Ensemble Therapeutics Corporation to reflect the Company's progress and emerging pipeline by applying its macrocycle drug platform to develop novel therapeutics. The new name, Ensemble Therapeutics, conveys the company's leadership and advancement in developing novel macrocycle drug compounds that are small molecules with expanded therapeutic properties of large molecule biological drugs.

“Our capabilities to deploy our proprietary platform to assess large numbers of macrocycles and to rapidly optimize leads for potential development of novel drug has evolved dramatically and been highly successful. We are demonstrating that Ensemblins are the key to addressing a large number of historically challenging drug targets.”

"The macrocycle-based drug discovery platform has become our clear focus and the evolution of our company's name both reflects that focus and, more importantly, the dramatic success we have achieved recently." said Dr. Michael D. Taylor, CEO of Ensemble Therapeutics." Dr. Taylor further said, "We also are delighted to announce the addition of Kisco Ltd. to our syndicate of top-tier investors. As an advanced materials specialty company, they have keen eye for innovative technologies and found Ensemble to be a technology company they felt had an exceptional future."

Since its founding, Ensemble has applied its proprietary DNA-programmed drug discovery platform in a number of areas, including therapeutics and diagnostics, but recently has narrowed the focus to macrocycle therapeutics, Ensemblins^TM. With their unique macrocyclic structure, Ensemblins are a new class of drugs that are orally-active therapeutics with unique properties for binding to human disease targets, including targets that are currently only accessible with costly, injectable biologic drugs or currently undruggable intra-cellular targets.

Ensemble Therapeutics is the first company to successfully and reliably engineer synthetic macrocycle drugs, and the company has produced the industry's largest collections of macrocycle drug compounds, currently more than 600,000. Ensemble Therapeutics' most advanced lead compound has been shown to exert potent anti-inflammatory and anti-arthritic activity in animal models and is orally bioavailable. Together with the company's collaboration partners, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer, Ensemble Therapeutics is making rapid progress in applying the platform against historically challenging drug targets that cannot be modulated effectively by traditional small molecule pharmaceuticals.

"Our Ensemblin^TM platform continues to progress at an accelerating rate," said Nick Terrett, CSO of Ensemble Discovery. "Our capabilities to deploy our proprietary platform to assess large numbers of macrocycles and to rapidly optimize leads for potential development of novel drug has evolved dramatically and been highly successful. We are demonstrating that Ensemblins are the key to addressing a large number of historically challenging drug targets."