South Korea’s Daewoong Pharmaceutical said Tuesday it has signed a deal with Sygnature Discovery, a UK-based discovery and preclinical solutions provider, to find potential candidates for autoimmune diseases treatment.

Under the agreement, Daewoong Pharmaceutical will use Sygnature Discovery’s drug discovery technology, such as "fragment-based drug discovery," and virtual screening to find effective substances to use in treatments.

“We are engaging in collaborations to foster innovative platform technologies for the development of global drugs,” Park Joon-seok, head of the Drug Discovery Center at Daewoong, added. “This deal marks the expansion of our product pipeline.”

The drugmaker also described this as an opportunity to bolster its capabilities in developing drugs targeting protein-protein interaction.

The two companies will work together to test and verify the efficacy and mechanisms of the candidates and to accelerate development.

Simon Hurst, founder and CEO of Sygnature Discovery, said, “Sygnature is building an FBDD platform that combines a library of fragmented compounds with effective biophysical screening technology to quickly identify and prove its efficacy. We hope to use this technology to accelerate Daewoong Pharmaceutical's process of discovering effective high-value drugs."