bitBiome, Inc. (Head office: Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo; President: Yuji Suzuki; hereafter 'bitBiome') and Kaken Pharmaceuticals (Head office: Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo; President: Hiroyuki Horiuchi; hereafter 'Kaken') have signed a joint research agreement on the discovery of drugs for infectious diseases with high unmet medical needs.

bitBiome has been rapidly discovering multiple novel substances with stronger antimicrobial activity than traditional drugs from the large microbial single-cell genome database we have accumulated, utilizing our high-throughput screening system, and our ability to improve upon those discovered through directed evolution. Kaken's vision for their research and development strategy in their Long-term Business Plan 2031 is to continuously launch world-class, groundbreaking new drugs in three key areas, immunology, neurology and infectious diseases.

In this joint research, both will utilize the microbial platform technology developed by bitBiome to obtain drug candidates for the treatment of infectious diseases with high unmet medical needs.

"This collaboration represents an exciting opportunity for bitBiome and more broadly, for the development of next-generation antimicrobials. Over the past few years bitBiome has been focused on the development of our database which represents an enormous collection of novel microbial genes. Many of them represent enzymes or proteins with enhanced or new functionalities important for biotechnology, drug development, and industrial applications. bitBiome is committed to contributing to these fields both through direct discovery from our database, and through design-based directed evolution of proteins of interest", said Yuji Suzuki, Chief Executive Officer of bitBiome.