PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--twoXAR, Inc., a company dedicated to improving health through computation, today announced its collaboration with researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to further validate computational approaches in early-stage drug discovery. As part of this collaboration, twoXAR is working with Professors Avi Ma’ayan, PhD and John Cijiang He, MD/PhD to investigate and validate the efficacy of repurposing candidates aimed at treating diabetic nephropathy (DN), a condition that is the leading cause of chronic kidney disease in the United States.
Repurposing candidates were identified using twoXAR’s computational methodology, and cross-examined against candidates identified using methods developed in the Ma’ayan Lab. Both technologies leverage machine learning and large biomedical datasets to make unanticipated disease-to-candidate matches. Researchers, under the direction of Dr. Cijiang He, Division Chief of Nephrology at The Mount Sinai Hospital, will test the efficacy of predicted drug candidates via in vivo testing in DN animal models. The collaboration aims to generate the pre-clinical evidence required to advance these candidates into clinical testing.
“I believe that twoXAR’s approach to computational drug discovery has the potential to make a significant impact on research and development within the biopharmaceutical industry,” said Dr. Ma’ayan, who is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacological Sciences and Director of the Mount Sinai Center for Bioinformatics. “Traditional drug development is plagued with inefficiency, a low success rate, and expensive wet-lab discovery and validation methods. We are pleased to collaborate with twoXAR and apply our combined methodologies in pursuit of better medicines for people living with diabetic nephropathy.”
In the United States, approximately 29 million people, or 9 percent of the population, are estimated to have diabetes. Up to 30 percent of all diabetics will develop evidence of kidney damage (nephropathy). The early stages of kidney damage often do not cause noticeable symptoms until the disease progresses to end-stage renal disease (ESRD). There are currently no medicines specifically indicated for diabetic nephropathy. Current treatments consist of keeping blood sugar levels under control and blood pressure levels down through medications and lifestyle changes.
“Dr. Ma’ayan is one of the world’s leading experts in computational drug discovery and we are very pleased to be working with him and his colleagues from the Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to advance treatment options for the millions of people living with diabetic nephropathy,” said Andrew A. Radin, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of twoXAR. “Through this collaboration, we have been able to validate our predictions against complementary computational methods developed in Dr. Ma’ayan’s lab and collaborate to identify the best candidates for in vivo testing. We plan to develop additional evidence that would support the advancement of these candidates into clinical trials.”
twoXAR has developed patent‐pending algorithms that enable it to find unanticipated associations between disease and drug candidates orders of magnitudes faster than wet lab‐based approaches. The company’s integrative biomedical software platform rapidly evaluates massive public and proprietary datasets to identify and rank high probability disease‐to‐candidate matches. These matches can then be used to prioritize existing candidates, perform targeted searches and identify novel drug candidates for further preclinical and clinical testing. The platform is disease agnostic and has been tested on more than 55 conditions to date in therapeutic areas including autoimmune, oncologic, and neurologic disorders.
About twoXAR
Founded in 2014, twoXAR is transforming how large integrated biomedical datasets are harnessed to accelerate disease-to-candidate identification in new drug development. Based in Palo Alto, California, the twoXAR team includes experts in drug discovery, biomedical informatics, computational biology, data science, software development and preclinical validation. For more information please visit, www.twoXAR.com.
