Hyderabad based Excelra, a leading global Data and Analytics company, has announced a Drug Repurposing partnership with Keio University School of Medicine – a top research university in Japan, to explore new therapeutics for a rare indication.

Under the agreement, a team of chemo-informaticians and data scientists at Excelra will collaborate with Dr. Toshiki Takenouchi, Assistant Professor of Paediatrics, to identify drugs with activity against a key target in the Takenouchi-Kosaki syndrome. The Takenouchi-Kosaki syndrome is a highly heterogenous autosomal complex congenital developmental disorder affecting multiple organ systems. Excelra's scientists will leverage its proprietary Global Integrated Drug Repurposing Platform, comprising comprehensive repurposing databases, repurposing algorithms, analytics tools and visualization engines to expand the utility of approved drugs. The database within the Drug Repurposing Platform has been built by amassing chemical data (over 7 million chemical entities), biological data and clinical data (over 200,000 data points), together contributing to more than 10 million associations among 'drug-disease-target' triads.

Dr. Nandu Gattu, Senior Vice President, Pharma Analytics, Excelra, said, "Drug Repurposing is an attractive strategy to reduce the cost of developing new therapies by tapping into the repertoire of approved drugs with a known safety profile. It is our privilege to work with Dr. Takenouchi in this endeavour to explore the therapeutic potential of existing drugs for a rare disease."