Making the Pharmaceutical Industry a Core Industry in Japan: Launch of the “FRONTEO Co-creation Drug Discovery Ecosystem”

Centered on the AI-driven drug discovery support service “Drug Discovery AI Factory,” the company aims to solve drug discovery challenges and create innovative pharmaceuticals through collaboration with diverse co-creation partners

Tokyo, Japan, May 7, 2025 - FRONTEO, Inc. (Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan; President & CEO: Masahiro Morimoto; hereinafter “FRONTEO”) has launched the “FRONTEO Co-creation Drug Discovery Ecosystem,” centered on the drug discovery support service “Drug Discovery AI Factory” (hereinafter “DDAIF”)^*1, which utilizes the company’s proprietary AI “KIBIT.” Within this ecosystem, FRONTEO will use DDAIF to generate a large number of target candidates and indication hypotheses at high throughput^*2. By advancing subsequent processes in collaboration with partners, FRONTEO aims to improve the success rate of drug development and address social challenges such as unmet medical needs in the field of rare diseases and the soaring costs of drug discovery.

The Current State of Drug Discovery in Japan
The rising costs of drug discovery, driven by the burden of investing in technology and talent to address the increasing complexity and sophistication of development processes in recent years, are cited as one of the factors hindering pharmaceutical companies’ ability to continuously create new drugs. Additionally, constraints on development resources and capabilities make it difficult to address unmet medical needs^*3 in areas with small market sizes, such as rare diseases and pediatric diseases.
As a countermeasure to these challenges, a horizontal division-of-labor drug discovery scheme is being promoted, in which academia, biotech startups, and pharmaceutical companies share the drug discovery process. However, due to a lack of collaboration from both technical and commercial perspectives resulting from the fragmentation of specialized fields, the drug discovery process tends to become fragmented, with each stage optimized individually. Consequently, the productivity gains across the entire process achieved through this division-of-labor scheme remain limited.

About the FRONTEO Co-creation Drug Discovery Ecosystem


The “FRONTEO Co-creation Drug Discovery Ecosystem” establishes collaborative frameworks with optimal partners tailored to specific disease areas and modalities. Centered on DDAIF—which enables high-throughput target molecule and indication screening—the ecosystem drives the entire drug discovery process consistently from data analysis (dry research) through modality exploration and optimization, to preclinical and clinical trials, with a focus on overall optimization.
This approach aims to address challenges by: (1) improving productivity across the entire drug discovery process; (2) shortening the drug discovery timeline; and, as a result, (3) rapidly and continuously generating new drug candidates for a diverse range of disease areas, including rare diseases.
Under this ecosystem concept, TechnoPro R&D participates as a partner responsible for wet research (biological validation) and virtual screening of drug candidate compounds generated by FRONTEO^*4. We will continue to promote partnerships with various companies and academic institutions with the aim of realizing this concept at an early stage.

Notes:

*1 DDAIF: An AI-driven drug discovery support service in which FRONTEO’s drug discovery experts, well-versed in both AI and drug discovery, leverage the natural language processing technology of FRONTEO’s proprietary AI “KIBIT” and its proprietary analytical methods to provide hypothesis generation for target molecule and indication discovery.
https://lifescience.fronteo.com/products/drug-discovery-ai-factory/
*2 high throughput: In the field of drug discovery, the ability to rapidly process and evaluate a large number of samples, conditions, and candidates within a short period of time.
*3 unmet medical needs: The need for new drugs, therapies, or treatment approaches for diseases for which effective treatments have not yet been established.
*4 February 20, 2025, press release: FRONTEO and TechnoPro R&D Company enter into a business partnership agreement regarding research and development solutions for drug discovery, https://www.fronteo.com/pr/20250220

About FRONTEO Drug Discovery AI Factory (DDAIF)

[Reference: Initiatives with pharmaceutical companies and Academia]
https://www.fronteo.com/news/ddaif-list