H3 Biomedicine, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biopharmaceutical company specializing in  discovering and developing precision oncology treatments, and Selvita, a drug discovery company in Eastern Europe, have entered into a strategic collaboration to develop breakthrough precision medicines for cancers. The companies will seek to validate the importance and feasibility of several kinase targets in specific genetic contexts and to generate multiple novel drug candidates against those targets.

Recent advances in human cancer genomics have revealed novel target opportunities that will enable new approaches to developing cancer medicines. H3 Biomedicine has built extensive and proprietary target acumen. It also has implemented a set of unique tools and research engines in the areas of cancer genomics, bioinformatics and target validation to lend biological insight to genomic findings. These capabilities will help to accelerate its collaborative drug discovery and development efforts.

"Our goal at H3 Biomedicine is to—in a very focused way—utilize the genomic information from public and proprietary data sets to identify and validate highly relevant cancer genes and to develop effective therapies against those targets," said Markus Warmuth, M.D., president and chief executive officer, H3 Biomedicine. "Both H3 Biomedicine and Selvita value early validation of drug targets to achieve preclinical proof of concept followed by translation of these findings into novel therapies for targeted patient populations. This collaboration brings Selvita's kinase biology platform and medicinal chemistry capabilities together with H3's expertise in target validation, bioinformatics and genomics analysis.”