RARE Daily

Healx Enters Partnership with Ono Pharmaceutical to Repurpose Drugs for Rare Diseases

August 10, 2021

Healx, which has developed an artificial intelligence platform for repurposing existing therapies for rare diseases, entered a partnership with Japan’s Ono Pharmaceutical to leverage Healx’s technology to identify new disease indications with high unmet needs that could be treated by Ono’s proprietary assets.

Healx has built a suite of technologies to rapidly identify and progress new therapies for some of the 95 percent of rare diseases currently without an approved treatment. At the core of Healx’s technological capabilities is their AI drug discovery platform, Healnet. Healnet integrates data from biomedical research, patient insight, scientific literature, and curated proprietary information. This data is analyzed with AI to discover novel disease biology and modes of action, without being limited to a single biological target to find non-obvious disease-compound relationships with the highest probability of success.

Under the terms of the partnership agreement, Healx will deploy Healnet to find multiple new therapeutic indications for Ono’s proprietary assets. Healx will also use its drug discovery and development expertise to provide Ono with a clear rationale for the predictions as well as a roadmap for preclinical validation of the assets.

Ono will then select diseases from Healx’s therapeutic recommendations and progress them towards further validation studies.

“By combining the profiling data of new drug candidates and Healx’s AI technology, we expect to increase the efficiency of finding clinical indications with high prediction accuracy and identifying new drug candidates,” said Toichi Takino, executive director of discovery and research at Ono Pharmaceutical.

Healx said the research collaboration will expand its precision medicine and drug discovery capabilities by increasing Healnet’s coverage of common disease signatures and enhancing the power and reach of its treatment predictions for conditions with high unmet medical needs.

Author: Rare Daily Staff

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