HitGen Inc. ('HitGen', SSE: 688222.SH), a China-based drug discovery research company, announced on Thursday that it has entered into a collaboration with The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a public-private partnership that supports the discovery of new medicines through open-access research.

Under the collaboration, HitGen is to use its DNA-encoded library (DEL) technology platform, specifically OpenDEL, to screen under-represented targets selected by SGC. The screening datasets, curated in a ML-ready format, will be posted to a publicly accessible portal to facilitate drug discovery and ML experts from around the world to model the data and make predictions about new active molecules that would be experimentally tested at SGC as part of the Target 2035 initiative.

Dr Jin Li, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of HitGen Inc, said, 'We look forward to working with the research teams at SGC to generate novel starting points for under-studied proteins and to place ML-ready representations of the data into the public domain on an open access basis. As one of HitGen's four core technology platforms, our world-leading DEL platform is an efficient 'engine' to advance drug discovery and has enabled hit identification and lead generation for many innovative discovery programs by our customers and partners. We look forward to delivering useful starting points for targets chosen by SGC.'