Schrödinger has announced the launch of new immune disease-focused Tectora Therapeutics, which comes online with a $55 million series A financing round in tow.
For the launch, Schrödinger contributed two early-stage small molecule programs, in turn winning an equity stake in Tectora and eligibility to receive future milestones and royalties.
Tectora will partner with Schrödinger’s drug discovery experts and leverage Schrödinger’s computational platform to help advance these candidates to the clinic.
“Schrödinger is a software company, but it has stakes in quite a lot of really exciting programs, and this is an expansion of that,” Karen Akinsanya, Ph.D., Schrödinger’s President of Therapeutics R&D, told Fierce. “We intend to keep expanding these discovery collaborations.”
Tectora will be focused on developing differentiated oral medicines for immunology and inflammation and will operate in stealth, Akinsanya told Fierce. The two small molecule programs, SDGR-4594 and SDGR-8139, bestowed upon Tectora by Schrödinger, are currently undisclosed, but are products of Schrödinger’s computational platform, she said.
The company's approach revolves around a physics-based computational chemistry platform that has the ability to predict potency, selectivity, solubility and permeability, according to Akinsanya. It hinges on atomistic modeling, which is a simulation technique to study the behavior of molecules by tracking individual atoms, the basic building blocks of all matter in the universe, and their interactions.
“The motivation is to have dedicated capital going towards these programs [SDGR-4594 and SDGR-8139] for their future development, but also to allow a dedicated team of experts around the science behind the programs,” Akinsanya said.
New York-headquartered Schrödinger has a deep history of founding and building biotech companies.
Schrödinger-backed Nimbus Therapeutics, a Fierce15 winner in 2013, has racked up a number of Big Pharma deals, including a $1.3 billion pact with Eli Lilly on an oral obesity therapy, and a $4 billion sale to Takeda for its tyrosine kinase 2 (TYK2) program, zasocitinib, which recently enjoyed a positive phase 3 data readout in difficult-to-treat psoriasis.
In July 2024, meanwhile, Eli Lilly bought Schrödinger’s Morphic and an oral, midphase challenger to Takeda’s injectable inflammatory bowel disease blockbuster Entyvio for $3.2 billion. Ajax Therapeutics, recently acquired by Eli Lilly in a potential $2.3 billion deal, was co-founded by Schrödinger in 2019 to develop small molecules for hematologic malignancies.