Empress Therapeutics is a pioneering company dedicated to transforming drug discovery and development. They focus on developing new treatments for a wide array of challenging conditions. Their approach aims to bring certainty and speed to the process of creating medicines, addressing unmet medical needs through novel scientific strategies.
Understanding Empress Therapeutics
Empress Therapeutics was established in 2020 by Flagship Pioneering, a well-known biotech funder and incubator. The company’s foundational philosophy centers on identifying drug-like chemistry found within the human body. This perspective drives their approach to tackling medical challenges. Their vision is to generate effective medicines rapidly by leveraging internal biological processes.
Empress Therapeutics believes the human body holds a vast, untapped source of potential therapeutics. They aim to unlock this potential by connecting genetic information with the chemical compounds produced naturally within the body. This approach seeks to overcome the limitations of traditional drug discovery methods, which often involve screening a massive number of synthetic compounds.
Core Therapeutic Strategy
Empress Therapeutics employs a scientific approach called Chemilogics™. This platform combines insights from genetic data, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and synthetic biology. The idea is to understand how DNA programs cells to produce chemical compounds, known as metabolites, through the action of enzymes. By tracing these connections, Empress aims to identify small molecules that have naturally evolved within the human body to interact with specific disease targets.
The Chemilogics™ platform focuses on the human metagenome, which includes both an individual’s own genome and the collective genomes of microorganisms residing within the body. The gut microbiome alone contains millions of unique protein sequences, vastly outnumbering the protein-coding genes in the human genome. Empress uses computational and genetic technologies to create small molecule compounds with favorable drug properties from this biological source. This method allows for the systematic generation of promising drug candidates at an accelerated pace, often reducing discovery timelines from years to months.
Diseases They Address
Empress Therapeutics aims to treat a range of diseases, focusing on areas where conventional treatments are often insufficient. These include immune and inflammatory conditions, as well as metabolic, neurologic, oncologic, and pain disorders. The company seeks to provide effective oral medicines for these areas.
Many of these conditions are difficult to treat with traditional methods due to the complexity of their underlying biological pathways or the inaccessibility of their targets to larger molecules. Empress Therapeutics’ approach, which focuses on small molecules sourced from within the body, offers a solution. Small molecules possess properties that allow them to more easily cross cell membranes and reach intracellular targets, which are often unreachable by larger, more complex biological drugs. Empress seeks to develop therapies that are both effective and well-tolerated.
Advancements in Their Pipeline
Empress Therapeutics has made progress in its research and development pipeline. The company has identified 15 drug leads across multiple diseases and target classes. These drug candidates span various structural classes and are designed to target several types of proteins, including cytokines, enzymes, G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), and ion channels.
Empress plans to file multiple investigational new drug (IND) applications within the next 24 months. This indicates their therapies are moving from the discovery phase into preclinical and early clinical development. The company’s progress is attributed to its efficient Chemilogics™ platform, which allows for accelerated drug candidate generation. Empress focuses on translating these promising leads into potential treatments for patients.