HTG Molecular Diagnostics, Inc. provided an update on the progress of its drug discovery business unit, including the filing of a patent application directed towards its first therapeutics target, and announced that its management team will be hosting in-person meetings at the LifeSci Partners 2023 Corporate Access Event from January 9-11, 2023 in San Francisco, CA. HTG Therapeutics, the company's drug discovery business unit, has been actively using its transcriptome-informed approach to drug discovery to design and further refine small-molecule chemical libraries throughout 2022. This drug discovery platform is an integrated transcriptomic machine learning chemistry-based drug discovery engine that is expected to help overcome the traditional challenges of selecting and designing drug candidates by rendering a higher potential for success in development.

The goal of this transcriptome-informed approach is to enable the selection and characterization of de-risked candidate molecules across selected therapeutic targets of interest leading to potential business development and licensing opportunities in various therapeutic areas. As a result of the progress made in 2022, the company filed a patent application on December 28, 2022, which included claims directed toward specific compounds, pharmaceutical compositions and methods of treating or preventing disease by administration of the compounds. HTG Therapeutics' initial therapeutic pipeline is focused on oncology and degenerative neuroscience, emphasizing pharmacologic targets with understood roles in the progression of diseases in these areas.

The most advanced discovery program in oncology is a small molecule program for treatment of liquid tumors. This program is expected to complete lead optimization at the end of the first quarter of 2023, with advancement to support entry into preclinical development later in the year. HTG has another oncology directed small molecule program for the treatment of a solid tumor type that is nearing completion in the hit-to-lead discovery phase, with lead optimization efforts planned through the second quarter of 2023 and subsequent preparation for potential preclinical development expected by the end of 2023.

HTG expects to initiate several early discovery-stage programs evaluating small molecule candidates against a variety of different cancers, from which HTG plans to select candidates for additional indications as the company builds that portion of its overall drug discovery pipeline. In its neuroscience pipeline, the company has completed early discovery stage efforts and chemical library generation for candidate small molecules for application to neurodegenerative conditions which are expected to be in hit-to-lead by the second half of 2023. In parallel to these therapy-area specific programs, HTG continues to enrich the proprietary dataset supporting its transcriptome-informed drug discovery platform and continues to evolve and refine the complementary artificial intelligence and machine-learning portion of this novel engine throughout these discovery processes.