Tavros Therapeutics, OpenBench Enter Small Molecule Drug Discovery Pact

Tavros Therapeutics, Inc., a precision oncology platform company, and OpenBench, Inc., a screening platform pioneering small molecule discovery partnerships, have entered into a collaboration to discover small molecule modulators of up to five oncology targets across an initial 18-month term. The agreement expands the companies’ original collaboration to pursue a first-in-class cancer target, announced in December 2021.

OpenBench will receive an upfront payment for their services and payment upon the identification and experimental confirmation of novel small molecule chemotypes that meet Tavros’ potency and developability criteria. In exchange, Tavros gains exclusive access to OpenBench’s screening technology with respect to the promising cancer targets. 

“This deepening partnership with OpenBench underscores the strength of our drug discovery platform and is a key step toward building our internal pipeline of targeted cancer therapies,” said Tavros CEO and co-founder Eoin McDonnell. “Complementing our next-generation synthetic lethality platform with OpenBench’s success-driven AI chemistry approach brings additional innovation and speed to our work discovering and developing first-in-class cancer drugs.”

“We are thrilled to continue building upon the foundation of success established in our initial collaboration with Tavros,” said OpenBench CEO and co-founder Jim Thompson. “Combining our proprietary AI-enabled screening platform with Tavros’ innovation in identifying synthetic vulnerabilities represents a real opportunity to accelerate discovery of promising cancer targets for areas of high unmet medical need.”