Vyant Bio & OrganoTherapeutics Announce Strategic Collaboration 

Vyant Bio, Inc. and OrganoTherapeutics recently announced they have entered into a collaboration agreement to work toward accelerating the discovery of drugs for the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease.

The collaboration brings together the respective teams’ expertise in drug discovery using human-derived cells, high-throughput biology and chemistry, and machine learning-based therapeutic design to identify potential PD drugs. Together, they will focus on the identification of drug candidates that rescue the PD phenotype through the development of disease-linked, clinically- translatable assays and biomarkers through multiple molecular, biochemical, and cellular methods. This approach will integrate and leverage OrganoTherapeutic’s complex, patient-derived, 3D-organoid disease models derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and Vyant Bio’s iPSC expertise and its AnalytiX machine learning technology.

OrganoTherapeutics has developed Parkinson’s Disease-specific midbrain organoids from multiple PD patients, providing the ability to more fully understand drug response based on genetic differences. Robert Fremeau, PhD, Vyant Bio’s Chief Scientific Officer, states “This collaboration with OrganoTherapeutics is another example of Vyant Bio’s commitment to accelerate the discovery and development of transformative therapies for patients living with severe CNS diseases. We are pleased to announce this collaboration with OrganoTherapeutics as they bring deep knowledge and innovative approaches to Parkinson’s Disease-based drug discovery. Together, we will expand our human-first platform in neurodevelopmental disorders such as Rett Syndrome and CDKL5 deficiency disorder into Parkinson’s Disease and ultimately other neurodegenerative disorders.”

Jens Schwamborn, PhD, OrganoTherapeutics Co-Founder and CEO, confirms the anticipated benefits of the collaboration, “The specific genetic and environmental causes in most Parkinson’s patients are unknown. By focusing initially on disease-linked genetic mutations, we plan to identify common causes and potential therapeutic approaches that can be expanded into the much larger patient population. We look forward to integrating our approaches with Vyant Bio.”

“We know that therapies for diseases that affect the CNS are difficult to discover: it requires meaningful innovation and exceptional scientific expertise to tackle,” said Jay Roberts, CEO of Vyant Bio. “This collaboration is another in a series of strategic moves to focus our efforts while accelerating our position in drug discovery through the use of technologies that allow insight into human biology early in the discovery of CNS drugs.”

Vyant Bio, Inc. is an innovative biotechnology company focused on identifying unique biological targets and novel and repurposed therapeutics. Vyant Bio has built a platform of therapeutics to treat neurological developmental and degenerative diseases, with current programs targeting Rett Syndrome (Rett), CDKL5 Deficiency Disorders (CDD), and Parkinson’s Disease. The company’s approach to drug discovery integrates human-derived biology with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to de-risk candidate selection, with the goal of improving the known effectiveness of drugs discovered earlier in the development cycle. Vyant Bio’s management believes that drug discovery needs to progressively shift to more efficient methods as the widely used models for predicting safe and effective drugs have under-performed, as evidenced by the significant time and cost of bringing novel drugs to market. By combining sophisticated data science capabilities with highly functional human cell derived disease models, Vyant Bio seeks to leverage its current ability to screen and test therapeutic candidates, which will allow for creating a unique approach to assimilating data that supports decision making iteratively throughout the discovery phase of drug development to identify both novel and repurposed CNS candidates. For more information, visit www.vyantbio.com.

OrganoTherapeutics is a spin-off from the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg. The company has developed a human Parkinson’s disease patient specific midbrain organoid based drug development pipeline. It is the goal of OrganoTherapeutics to use this pipeline to develop novel therapeutics, that are not just symptomatic treatments, but which function as truly neuroprotective compounds. In all approaches the usage of human patient specific models, representing actual patients are the center of interest. OrganoTherapeutics’ areas of expertise include not only the in vitro disease modeling with advanced stem cell technologies but also the artificial intelligence supported data analysis, visualization and interpretation. For more information, visit http://organo-therapeutics.com/.