Vyant Bio (NASDAQ:VYNT) Inc, a biotech company discovering new therapeutics for neurological diseases and hard-to-treat cancers, and Cyclica Inc, announced a non-exclusive strategic collaboration combining Vyant Bio (NASDAQ:VYNT)’s patient-derived complex organoid biology alongside Cyclica’s proteome-wide, Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled discovery platform to identify new treatments for CDKL5 Deficiency Disorder (CDD), a severe neurodevelopmental epilepsy disorder with no effective treatments or cure.
Cherry Hill, New Jersey-based Vyant’s human-first approach to novel drug discovery incorporates patient biology into the earliest steps of the process with highly functional, disease-based neural organoids; while Cyclica’s proprietary machine learning platforms marry knowledge and structure-based approaches to find novel targets, uncover new uses for existing drugs, and design new molecules with high potential.
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“Combined, the technologies aim to identify, validate, and progress new targets as well as new and existing compounds for streamlined and de-risked CDD-based drug discovery,” said the company.
Vyant Bio has deep experience in using human-based disease biology to ensure that early findings are directly related to the patients destined to receive treatments. They have incorporated CDD-based neural organoids into their platforms and are using initial findings to build a robust drug discovery pipeline.
“Last quarter we had launched commercial stage, novel disease models for CDD,” said Vyant Bio CEO Jay Roberts in a statement. “With this strategic collaboration we have the advantage of leveraging Cyclica’s demonstrated ability to identify unique relationships between compounds, proteins, cellular pathways, and diseases, as well as their AI-based drug discovery.”
Roberts noted that the “complementary technologies,” combined with the firm’s additional pre-clinical expertise, will “accelerate the identification of potential medicines and therapies to help children with the devastating disease.”
“We continue to be focused on rapidly identifying small and large molecule therapeutics to treat central nervous system and oncology-related diseases,” added Roberts.
Meanwhile, Cyclica co-founder and CEO Naheed Kurji echoed the enthusiasm for the partnership.
“Cyclica is building the biotech pipeline of the future, and partnerships with leading organizations like Vyant Bio are key to streamline the discovery of better medicines,” said Kurji. “Given the unique synergy of Vyant Bio’s in vitro screening approach to human disease and Cyclica’s multi-targeted and multi-objective drug discovery platform, we aim to bring novel therapeutics to patients suffering from CDD.”
Contact the author Uttara Choudhury at uttara@proactiveinvestors.com
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