Healx partners with Ono Pharmaceutical to expand AI capabilities for rare diseases

Drug discovery biotech Healx will work with Ono Pharmaceutical on a project to identify new disease indications with high unmet needs.

The collaboration will see Healx using its indication expansion technology to identify new disease indications which Ono can target with its assets.

Healx has developed a range of technologies which utilise artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and progress new therapies for rare diseases that don’t currently have an approved treatment. Its AI drug discovery platform, Healnet, integrates data from sources such as biomedical research and articles, to form a detailed rare disease biomedical knowledge graph.

This graph is analysed by Healx’s AI methods to pinpoint non-obvious disease-compound relationships with the highest probability of success. Critically, these models are trained to discover novel disease biology and modes of action, without being limited to a single biological target.

Under the terms of the partnership agreement, Healx will deploy Healnet to find multiple new therapeutic indications for Ono’s proprietary assets. Healx will also utilise its drug discovery and development expertise to provide Ono with a clear rationale for the predictions as well as a roadmap for preclinical validation of the assets. Ono will then select diseases from Healx’s therapeutic recommendations and progress them towards further validation studies.

It's hoped that the research collaboration will expand Healx’s precision medicine and drug discovery capabilities by increasing Healnet’s coverage of common disease signatures.

Commenting on the partnership, Toichi Takino, senior executive officer / Executive Director of Discovery & Research at Ono Pharmaceutical, said: “We extremely appreciate Healx’s AI technology, Healnet, for discovering new therapies that meet unmet medical needs in rare diseases. By combining the profiling data of new drug candidates and Healx’s AI technology, we expect to increase the efficiency of finding clinical indications with high prediction accuracy and identifying new drug candidates.”

Healx’s CEO, Dr Tim Guilliams, added: “It is a great privilege to work with a renowned drug discovery company like Ono - especially as they share our mission to bring new, effective treatments to patients in need. We are excited to deploy our technology to expand the number of diseases Ono’s assets can impact and, ultimately, provide novel treatments to patients around the world. We strongly believe in the power of our next-generation AI platform to deliver disease indication predictions with unprecedented speed, scale and accuracy, and we look forward to having more to share in the coming months”.