Otsuka Pharma acquires Jnana Therapeutics

Based on the terms of the agreement, Otsuka will pay USD $800 million to the shareholders of Jnana upon completion of the acquisition, as well as up to an additional $325 million in development and regulatory milestones.Jnana’s novel approach to drug discovery is enabled by RAPID – the company’s next-generation chemoproteomics platform designed to discover medicines for highly validated but challenging-to-drug targets. The platform leverages a high-throughput, binding-based screening approach that is inherently flexible, enabling the discovery of binding sites across the surface of a target protein and the identification of small molecules that elicit diverse pharmacologies. Jnana has used RAPID to successfully identify first-in-class compounds and address a range of historically challenging-to-drug target classes, including solute carriers, transcription factors, and signaling scaffold proteins. Jnana pursues drug discovery based on concepts that are complementary to those of Astex Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Otsuka based in Cambridge, UK. While Jnana’s RAPID platform is not limited to any specific therapeutic area, the company has built a unique competitive position by concentrating on PKU, a rare inherited metabolic disorder in which phenylalanine accumulates to abnormally high levels in the blood, and autoimmune diseases, where small molecule drug discovery has been challenging.