Vyant Bio (NASDAQ:VYNT) Inc CEO Jay Roberts told shareholders that after its merger the company is “well-positioned” to pursue the discovery of novel therapeutics to treat neurological diseases such as Rett Syndrome, CDKL5 Deficiency Disorders (CDD), and Parkinson’s Disease, a progressive nervous system (CNS) disorder that affects movement.
The StemoniX and Cancer Genetics merger was completed in early 2021, and Vyant Bio (NASDAQ:VYNT) was created to use its human cell-based microBrain and computer modeling platform, AnalytiX, to identify compounds that target neurological disorders.
In a letter to shareholders, Roberts said: “We are incorporating the use of quantitative biomarkers that we believe are unique to our Rett and CDD programs that should provide meaningful human-biology-derived, preclinical signals of potential drug efficacy before the commencement of clinical trials.”
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“We enter 2022 focused on cost efficiency and effectively bringing a repurposed drug candidate into clinical trials in the first half of 2023. Our first two novel drug candidates are expected to enter clinical trials in the second half of 2023,” he added.
The Cherry Hill, New Jersey-based biotechnology company’s first program with a repurposed drug VYNT 0126, will assess whether it can successfully use its integrated microBrain and AnalytiX platform to develop drugs that could provide treatment options to benefit patients with rare diseases.
“Clinical trials will indicate whether our measured impact on brain-wave activity in our organoid models offers some benefit to patients,” said Roberts. “We then plan to use our platform to accelerate the discovery of other CNS monogenetic diseases such as different forms of familial Parkinson’s Disease caused by mutations in specific genes that also play a role in the pathophysiology of the more common sporadic CNS diseases.”
Vyant entered 2022 with around $20 million in cash, a focused therapeutic interest, and three well-developed strategic partnerships, to position it to advance patient care, as well as to build and grow shareholder value.
In 2021, Vyant’s achievement embraced building patient stem cell-derived organoid models of brain disease which capture relevant genetics, targets, and cell types.
“Among the actions we took last year was the completion of our Rett and CDD microBrain disease models for high-throughput screening to support our own R&D programs. This has allowed us to complete several rounds of screening on artificial intelligence (AI) generated novel compounds, based on novel scaffolds, that show dose-dependent biomarker response in our models,” said Roberts.
“These results are at the core of leading us to the identification of specific compounds to take forward into the clinic, which we plan to announce later in 2022 once our intellectual property/patent work is complete and final selections are made of our lead candidates.”
While redirecting Vyant from a services company to a drug-discovery platform company, Roberts has employed new technologies and partnerships.
“We pursued key partnerships with companies that employ AI-based therapeutic creation and prediction in three areas: novel small-molecule design, proteome-based target identification, and novel biologics (protein) design,” said Roberts. “All three arrangements have meaningfully accelerated our focused CNS therapeutic discovery efforts.”
Vyant has completed a large microBrain-based screening of AI-generated novel compounds for Rett, with Atomwise Inc, its joint venture partner.
“This work has yielded ‘hit’ expansion across two unique biological targets and several novel compounds,” said Roberts.
In addition, the firm has a collaboration agreement with Cyclica Inc to screen compounds using Cyclica’s proteome-wide, AI-enabled discovery platform to identify new treatments for CDD, which is characterized by seizures that begin in infancy, followed by delays in many aspects of development. It’s a disease with no approved drugs.
As part of its third partnership, Roberts said that along with Ordaōs Bio, it is designing AI-generated small protein therapeutics against novel CNS targets and will assess their disease modifying actions in patient-derived organoids.
In September last year, Vyant began transitioning certain R&D activities from its La Jolla, California location to its Maple Grove, Minnesota facility. As a result of its overall focus on CNS diseases, it plans to cease broad-based external product and discovery-as-a-service revenue generation activities in the first half of 2022.
In light of these changes, substantially all the company’s Maple Grove staff will now also be focused on the company’s internal CNS drug discovery R&D pipeline.
Contact the author Uttara Choudhury at uttara@proactiveinvestors.com
Follow her on Twitter: @UttaraProactive