Ionis and Genuity Collaborate to Speed Translation of Insights into Therapeutics

Rare Daily Staff

Ionis Pharmaceuticals and Genuity Science have entered into a broad, multi-year collaboration aimed at accelerating the discovery and development of innovative therapeutics across a range of up to 20 diseases.

The collaboration will marry Ionis’ expertise in antisense therapeutics with Genuity’s genomics capabilities and is expected to play an important role in Ionis continuing to deliver transformational medicines to patients for many years to come.

Genuity Science’s approach combines high-quality, whole-genome sequence and deep phenotype data resulting in better definition of the underlying disease mechanisms. The partners believe this approach, when coupled with Ionis’ proprietary antisense technology, has the potential to significantly expedite the drug development process through a more direct translation of targets into therapeutics.

Under terms of the multi-year collaboration, Genuity Science will receive a combination of upfront payments and development milestones, plus product royalties. 

“The collaboration with Genuity Science gives us the potential to significantly increase our discovery opportunities and better understand the complexities of human diseases based on genetics,” said Brett Monia, CEO of Ionis.

Ionis’ antisense drug discovery platform created the first and only therapy to treat all ages of patients afflicted with the rare neurological disorder spinal muscular dystrophy, and it has a pipeline of more than 40 novel medicines in a broad array of therapeutic areas.

Genuity partners with global biopharma companies to offer deep end-to-end discovery services that include population-scale, disease-specific data sourcing, high-quality sequencing, robust statistical analysis and software tools for analyzing large datasets, and artificial intelligence.

“Combining the scale and depth of our datasets and our analytical expertise with Ionis’ pioneering antisense technology can more rapidly translate information into insights with potential to deliver breakthrough therapies to even more patients who need them,” said Rob Brainin, CEO of Genuity Science.

Photo: Brett Monia, CEO of Ionis