SAN FRANCISCO & MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Adynxx, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on pain and inflammation, and twoXAR, Inc., an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven biopharmaceutical company, today announced an agreement to develop an oral, non-hormonal drug therapy with the potential to address the underlying mechanisms of endometriosis and significantly improve upon the standard of care.
Under the agreement, twoXAR will use its proprietary AI technology to identify a set of drug candidates with the potential to treat or prevent the recurrence of endometriosis and associated symptoms. Adynxx will select candidates from this set to test for efficacy using in vivo models of endometriosis based on predetermined criteria. Following identification of one or more candidates based on those evaluated in vivo, Adynxx intends to conduct preclinical characterization work, IND-enabling work and clinical development. Further details of the agreement were not disclosed.
Endometriosis is an inflammatory disease that affects 176 million women worldwide and is characterized by abnormal growth of endometrial-like tissue outside the uterus.1 It is associated with a range of symptoms including chronic pelvic pain, dysmenorrhea, dyspareunia, subfertility and hyperalgesia. Current treatment options consist of hormonal therapies, analgesics and surgery, with medications generally being the first and most common option. It is estimated that endometriosis will affect one in 10 women of reproductive age, with approximately 4.4 million women having been laparoscopically diagnosed in the US alone,2 making endometriosis one of the most common gynecologic disorders in the US.3
“Cutting-edge AI technologies like twoXAR’s can help generate a new understanding of biology and provide a sensitive prediction of the therapeutic benefit of potential drug candidates,” said Julien Mamet, PhD, founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Adynxx. “This collaboration is part of our plan to build a diverse pipeline of promising therapies to address unmet medical needs in pain and inflammatory diseases such as endometriosis. We believe the discovery strategy designed with twoXAR will allow us to identify and develop compounds with an accelerated timeline, decreased risk and reduced costs to address a serious health problem impacting millions of women in the US and worldwide.”
“The combination of twoXAR’s unique capabilities in drug discovery with the Adynxx team’s clinical and drug development experience in pain, inflammation and women’s health enables an efficient discovery and development path for new therapies to reduce the burden of symptoms and directly target the disease biology,” said Andrew A. Radin, Co-Founder and CEO of twoXAR. “This collaboration with Adynxx expands the scope of our portfolio of disease programs to include specific indications within the therapeutic area of fibrotic diseases.”
About Adynxx
Adynxx is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on bringing to market novel, disease-modifying products for the treatment of pain and inflammation. Since its founding in 2007, Adynxx has worked to discover and develop transcription factor decoys to modify the course of pain. Adynxx’s resulting pipeline includes brivoligide, a Phase 2 drug candidate intended to address postoperative pain in a readily-identified group of patients with a greater risk of experiencing increased pain and elevated opioid use following surgery, and AYX2, a preclinical candidate intended to resolve chronic syndromes of pain, including both inflammatory and neuropathic pain. Through collaborations and in-licensing, Adynxx seeks to build a pipeline of complementary product candidates in pain and inflammation. For more information, visit www.adynxx.com.
About twoXAR
twoXAR is an artificial intelligence-driven biopharmaceutical company that leverages its computational platform to identify promising drug candidates, de-risk the opportunities through preclinical studies, and progress drug product candidates into the clinic through industry partnerships. Based in Mountain View, California, the twoXAR team includes experts in drug discovery and development, biomedical informatics, computational biology, data science and software development. Investors in twoXAR include SoftBank Ventures, the Andreessen Horowitz Bio Fund, OS Fund, CLI Ventures, and the Stanford-StartX Fund. For more information, please visit www.twoXAR.com.
1 Zondervan KT et al. Endometriosis. Nature Reviews Disease Primers. 2018; 4(9)
2 Globaldata EpiCast Report: Endometriosis – Epidemiology Forecast to 2025
3 The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Frequently Asked Questions FAQ013: Gynecologic Problems. Washington, DC: October 2012
