Roivant Sciences has agreed to acquire Silicon Therapeutics, a Boston-based drug design, research, and development company, for $450 million, in an all-share deal.

The Swiss biopharma company will also make additional payments to the US firm based on regulatory and commercial milestones.

Silicon Therapeutics is said to have developed a computational physics platform. The platform is used for the in silico design and optimization of small molecule drugs for challenging disease targets.

The computational physics platform includes custom methods that are based on quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, and statistical thermodynamics.

It is said to have been designed to address the needs for predicting binding energies and conformational behavior of molecules among other key bottlenecks in drug discovery projects.

The computational platform of Silicon Therapeutics is powered by the company’s supercomputing cluster and custom hardware, which are claimed to facilitate accurate all-atom simulations at timescales that are biologically meaningful.

Lanny Sun – co-founder and CEO of Silicon Therapeutics, commenting on Roivant Sciences acquisition of Silicon Therapeutics, said: “Silicon Therapeutics was founded with a vision of transforming the pharmaceutical industry through use of technology.

“By joining forces with Roivant, we can significantly accelerate making this vision a reality. Roivant has an impressive track record in clinical execution and building and deploying technology platforms to power pharmaceutical research, development and commercialization.”

Roivant Sciences said that the acquisition will strengthen and complement its targeted protein degradation (TPD) platform.

The TDP platform will be powered by the advanced machine learning models of VantAI, which will be trained on degrader-specific experimental data and by Silicon Therapeutics’ computational physics capabilities. Roivant Sciences believes that this will help address several modality-specific challenges of degrader design and optimization.

Furthermore, the integration of Silicon Therapeutics and VantAI will help Roivant Sciences to leverage both computational physics and machine learning-based methods to drug design.

Roivant Sciences hopes the combination of Silicon Therapeutics and VantAI to enable it to design other types of novel small molecule drugs against challenging targets like allosteric inhibitors, high-affinity ligands, and molecular glues.

Commenting on Roivant Sciences acquisition of Silicon Therapeutics, Matt Gline -CEO of Roivant Sciences, said: “We are delighted to integrate Silicon Therapeutics into Roivant as we continue to expand our capabilities in computationally-powered drug discovery.

“We intend to leverage our established development apparatus as we rapidly advance promising compounds from our drug discovery engine into clinical studies.”

  Boston, Drug discovery, Lanny Sun, machine learning, Pharma acquisition news, Roivant Sciences, Silicon Therapeutics, small molecule drugs, VantAI