MultiOmic Health, an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled precision medicine discovery company focused on chronic multifactorial diseases, and Alloy Therapeutics, a biotechnology ecosystem company dedicated to democratising access to drug discovery technologies, have announced they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly discover and develop first-in-class renal tissue-targeting drugs.
MultiOmic Health
Precision medicines for chronic renal conditions targeted to the kidney tissue of specific patient subpopulations are expected to display an order of magnitude improvement in both efficacy and safety, compared to conventional systemic drugs aimed at all patients diagnosed with those conditions.
MOH has discovered certain fast-progressor patient subpopulations with poor response to existing medicines, identified novel drug targets for treating those subpopulations and developed AI-enabled patient stratifier models that enable leaner clinical trials with higher chances of success. Alloy will deploy its bispecific antibody and genetic medicine platforms to engineer drugs that will modulate MOH-identified drug targets in specific kidney cell types. Leveraging its renal biology and pharmacology expertise, MOH will collaborate with Alloy to select optimal preclinical development candidates.
82VS, Alloy’s venture studio, will establish a new asset-centric drug development company (tentatively codenamed “RenalDevCo”) that will license the relevant intellectual property from Alloy and MOH. Alloy and MOH will each receive a substantial equity stake in RenalDevCo as well as downstream development milestone payments and single digit royalties. MOH will also receive research services payments to deploy its disease biology, pharmacology and medical expertise for overseeing IND-enabling studies and managing exploratory clinical trials.
“We were impressed by MOH’s patient stratification and target discovery platform while reviewing the drug targets they proposed,” said Mike Schmidt, Alloy Therapeutics’ chief scientific officer. “Their deep expertise in disease biology, pharmacology and exploratory drug development is rooted in several individuals with track records of taking assets to clinical stage and approval, complementing our own capabilities very well.”
“Alloy’s expertise in engineering therapeutics to target specific tissue types, as well as the range of drug modalities they work with, were big attractions for us,” said Michael Sierra, MultiOmic Health’s chief scientific officer. “Our experiences engaging with them to date have given us confidence that we can work effectively and synergistically.”
“We are excited to partner with Alloy, a well-known industry player with leading edge drug molecule engineering platforms that have been the basis of 10 clinical-stage assets so far, including two in Phase II trials,” said Robert Thong, MultiOmic Health’s CEO and co-founder. “Their recently announced collaborations with Pfizer and Sanofi, for respectively developing an advanced antibody discovery platform and for developing brain tissue-targeting RNA therapeutics, speak for themselves.”
“MOH’s platform can decipher many common chronic diseases where investigating genetic mutations alone has struggled to explain the rapid deterioration of substantial numbers of patients despite standard of care treatments,” said Errik Anderson, Alloy Therapeutics’ CEO and founder. “They are aiming to transform the health prospects of such patients with common diseases when many other industry researchers focus on rare and monogenic diseases. I see this strategic collaboration as potentially the first of many.”