A new era for oral macrocycle drug discovery
Powered by nGen: our industry-leading chemistry platform for next generation macrocycles that access an unexplored universe of chemical diversity
Our mission is to define a new era for macrocycle drugs and make great contributions to medicine. We are bringing together a world-class team to make this possible.
Our broad pipeline is initially focused on delivering oral macrocycle candidates against targets validated by blockbuster biologic drugs. The goal is to provide oral alternatives that provide meaningful value to healthcare and will enable the treatment of many more patients. In addition, we are exploring a broader variety of therapeutic areas with attractive target classes, including both intra- and extracellular targets.
Macrocycles are compounds with cyclic structures that enable impressive versatility and the unprecedented ability to target a wide range of protein targets. Despite natural discoveries that yielded blockbuster macrocycle drugs, de novo design has been unable to systematically deliver therapeutically successful macrocycles. A key challenge has been achieving the right properties to enable oral dosing and intracellular targeting. Among the near-infinite potential structures in macrocycle ‘chemical space’, identifying or designing candidates with these specific qualities was nearly impossible.
nCycles are the result of Orbis’ systematic approach to macrocycle space exploration. An nCycle is a macrocycle compound created by our nGen platform. Optimized for oral bioavailability and membrane permeability through a variety of parameters including a more modest size, nCycles are designed to deliver on the long-awaited promise of oral macrocycle drugs.
After decades of a field hampered by the complexities of de novo design, Orbis’s nGen platform is the first to systematically explore macrocycle chemical space in a high-throughput way and deliver oral macrocycle drug candidates suitable for both intra- and extracellular targets.
Based on world-class macrocycle chemistry expertise with proof-of-concept published in leading journals, nGen rapidly creates and tests vast numbers of diverse macrocyclic compounds with a full suite of assays to home in on nCycle candidates with desirable profiles. A single design-make-test-analyze cycle generates up to 100,000 unique target specific nCycles and each compound is then tested using a full suite of assays. Proprietary DNA-encoded libraries of nearly 100 billion compounds ensure that each nGen program starts with highly effective hit finding step to inform nCycle design.
These insights based on real compounds provide nCycles with a uniquely rich data footprint relative to other approaches – potentially de-risking and accelerating development.
nGen incorporates automation to make possible massively parallel library creation and assaying. The enormous amount of data nGen generates makes it highly synergistic with machine learning-driven enhancement, and Orbis is already harnessing in-house deep learning capabilities to accelerate the future of macrocycle medicine.
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Simon Feldbæk
Managing Director, CDO
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Sevan Habeshian
Co-Founder & CTO
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Daniela Brodbeck
VP, Discovery Biology & Operations
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Daniel Greve
VP, Drug Discovery
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Oliver Horlacher
Director, Data Science
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Morten Døssing
Executive Chair
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João Ribas
Interim CBO, Executive Board Member
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Marco Boorsma, Ph.D.
Board Member
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Vanessa Carle, Ph.D
Board Member
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Christian Heinis
Co-Founder, Board Member
