Ventus Therapeutics has opened a new biopharmaceutical laboratory and office facility in the Montreal suburb of Saint-Laurent, Que.

The new 24,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility more than doubles Ventus’ lab and office space in Montreal and allows the company to strategically expand its research and development capacity, said the Waltham, Mass.-based company in a news release.

The increased capacity will enable Ventus to continue its pipeline growth and further development of its proprietary ReSOLVE platform.

“This new facility expands our presence in Montreal and augments our existing facilities in Waltham, Mass.,” said Marcelo Bigal, president and CEO of Ventus. “The Montreal expansion will provide us with an increased footprint that enables us to enhance our R&D efforts, including further building out our ReSOLVE platform.

“ReSOLVE has already enabled three clinical-stage compounds, including our first-in-clinic, orally administered cGAS inhibitor, an important target for multiple autoimmune disorders that has remained elusive to other drug discovery approaches.”

He explained that ReSOLVE is a powerful machine-learning-enabled drug discovery engine that can be leveraged across multiple therapeutic areas to rapidly identify and develop novel small molecule drugs for undruggable targets.

The new facility serves as Ventus’ Montreal-based offices and laboratories for its drug discovery and development organization, including its medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics, and disease biology teams. Ventus said the opening facility represents the second phase of the company’s global expansion program, augmenting the 13,000-sf location in Waltham, which houses Ventus’ corporate offices and laboratories for its structural biology, biochemistry, protein sciences, molecular biology, and cellular biology teams.

Waltham is a Boston suburb.

Photo: Ventus Therapeutics