The collaboration utilises both companies’ drug discovery technologies, in particular C4XD’s Taxonomy3 novel target identification platform and ETX’s Network-driven Drug Discovery (NDD) capabilities.
Teams from both companies will use the outputs from C4XD’s Taxonomy3 genetic analysis of PD and apply an NDD approach to identify novel intervention strategies which it is expected will lead to new approaches for the treatment of PD.
C4XD’s proprietary target discovery technology Taxonomy3 has identified 180 novel disease associated genes in Parkinson’s Disease (PD) in addition to the identification of discrete patient sub-groups that could potentially provide an opportunity in stratified medicine.
The discovery of these new genetic associations further confirms the power of Taxonomy3 to generate novel genetic insights into diseases with high unmet medical need.
To put these findings into context, at the start of 2017 only 40 PD associated genes were known in the scientific literature, and last September, Genentech and 23andme published the results of their collaboration in the scientific journal Nature Genetics (Nature Genetics 49, 1511–1516, 2017), which identified a further 17 novel genetic variants representing 32 new PD associated genes.
The combination of C4XD’s proprietary novel disease associated genes with known PD literature genes provides a unique and rich dataset to apply to ETX’s NDD platform, harnessing the latest mathematical and data analysis techniques to augment and interrogate complex biological information.
This approach is expected to reveal further unique disease insights that may lead to additional drug discovery programmes beyond those identified by C4XD to date.
Terms of the agreement are undisclosed.
C4X Discovery CSO Craig Fox said: "This collaboration not only demonstrates the potential of C4XD’s drug discovery technologies but also highlights our desire to maximise the value from our novel genetic analysis by accessing complementary and synergistic proprietary technologies.
“This strategy will most effectively support our pursuit of licensable pre-clinical drug assets, such as the Orexin-1 receptor antagonist recently licensed to Indivior for up to $294m. We look forward to working with e-Therapeutics and to a successful outcome."
Source: Company Press Release.