Athos Therapeutics, Inc., a late preclinical stage biotechnology company pioneering the development of first-in-class precision therapeutics for patients with immune-mediated diseases, announced today a comprehensive Master Research Agreement for a collaborative project on Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) with Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. This collaboration will advance the use of systems biology and computational science for precision medicine in IBD, for conditions such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.
IBD is a chronic complex disease resulting from the dysregulation of the immune system triggered by genetic, epigenetic, microbial, and environmental factors. Medications currently prescribed for IBD have limited efficacy, multiple and potentially serious side effects, and do not take into consideration IBD patient subtypes. It is now clear that a systems biology approach can be used to properly characterize the heterogeneity of IBD at the molecular level. This approach can stratify IBD patients into specific molecular subtypes and enable the development of precision (custom-made) therapeutics.
"Currently available drugs for IBD intervene primarily on the inflammatory response of the condition and, although patients may experience clinical improvement, there is a progressive decline of therapeutic efficacy that requires the need to switch to other medications with unpredictable outcomes," said Dimitrios Iliopoulos, PhD, MBA, Chief Executive Officer of Athos. "Therefore, the field of IBD is in need of new approaches that can provide precise, long-lasting and safe therapeutic options for the millions of patients with IBD," he added. "Our collaboration is designed to identify actionable and specific IBD pathology stratifications by leveraging a large volume of highly annotated IBD biosamples to be used in our proprietary computational and systems biology approach."
"This collaboration represents a significant shift and a major advance in the therapeutics of IBD based on precision medicine that will accelerate the development of personalized, safer and more effective drugs for IBD and other autoimmune diseases," said Allan J. Pantuck, MD, MS, Chairman and Chief Medical Officer of Athos. "We look forward to working closely with Cleveland Clinic to work towards improving outcomes for patients with IBD."
"Cleveland Clinic is internationally recognized as a leader in the care of patients with IBD," said Claudio Fiocchi, M.D, of Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute. "This collaborative research will help to implement precision medicine for patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis."
About Athos Therapeutics
Athos Therapeutics Inc. is a late-stage preclinical biotech company developing small molecule therapeutics for immune-mediated diseases using artificial intelligence-generated innovative chemistry and computational platforms. The co-founders of Athos include one of the founders of Kite Pharma (acquired for $12B), the medicinal chemist behind two multi-billion-dollar FDA-approved drugs (Xtandi & Erleada), and the discoverer of the miR-124 drug target, currently in a Phase III IBD trial. Athos identifies novel drug targets (hubs) by integrating clinical and molecular datasets into the biological network of a disease (the disease interactome) and matches them to its small molecule computational chemistry platform. ATH-63, the Company's lead drug compound, is moving into a Phase I human clinical trials for patients with IBD in Q12022 at the Cleveland Clinic. Other Athos' pipeline programs include drugs for lupus and various types of cancers.
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