e-Therapeutics PLC (LON:ETX) has teamed up with C4X Discovery Holdings plc (LON:C4XD) in a bid to find new treatments for Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s is a long-term degenerative disorder, with typical symptoms including shaking and slowness of movement.
There is currently no cure for the disease, with treatments aimed instead at improving symptoms, albeit with limited success.
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C4X’s Taxonomy-3 platform uses sophisticated algorithms that run over genetic data time and again to identify the genes that contribute to someone having a disease.
So far, the technology has thrown up around 200 genes associated with Parkinson’s, which ETX has further analysed using its Network-Driven Drug Discovery (NDD) approach.
“By using the advanced computational analytics of our NDD platform, we have been able to confirm the centrality of a number of known mechanisms in PD and, importantly, identify potential new ones,” said ETX’s head of discovery biology, Alan Whitmore.
“This in turn, opens up the prospect of new approaches to the discovery of effective novel drugs to tackle this and other undertreated, debilitating conditions.”
C4X’s chief scientific officer Craig Fox added: “This combination [with ETX] has identified additional novel biological pathways for the treatment of PD and we look forward to moving these findings forward to initiate new drug discovery programmes.”
While both companies believe this approach could help to identify better treatments for PD, they think it could also work for other degenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis.