Nxera Pharma & PrecisionLife Expand Strategic R&D Partnership Into New Therapeutic Area


Nxera Pharma Co. Ltd and PrecisionLife recently announced the expansion of their strategic R&D partnership into auto-immune disorders with the potential to identify new drug targets for the treatment of complex, chronic conditions.

This is the latest in a series of collaborative agreements between Nxera and PrecisionLife, which began in 2022. The partnership aims to establish new drug targets and subsequently potential precision targeted therapies for auto-immune disorders, each linked to subgroups of patients by PrecisionLife’s mechanism-based patient stratification biomarkers.

PrecisionLife finds combinations of biological features that together are associated with disease risk and/or protective effects. These combinations, along with mechanistic biomarkers and causal biology insights to identify which patients will respond to treatment, may empower Nxera to more accurately position known and novel targets for the right responder populations in each target product profile.

Matt Barnes, EVP, President of Nxera Pharma UK and Head of R&D, said “PrecisionLife’s platform for enabling unique insight into disease biology supports our approach to identify the ‘right’ drug target and patient subgroups to leverage our world-leading discovery and early development capabilities and increase our probability of success to provide more effective treatments for patients.”

Steve Gardner, CEO, PrecisionLife, added “PrecisionLife is delighted to strengthen and expand its ongoing target discovery and translation partnership with Nxera Pharma, supporting them to accelerate the development of life-changing medicines for patients. It’s fantastic to have partners like Nxera who share our vision for making precision medicine a reality in chronic diseases, driven by our greater understanding of complex disease biology.”

Nxera Pharma (formerly Sosei Heptares) is a technology powered biopharma company, in pursuit of new specialty medicines to improve the lives of patients with unmet needs in Japan and globally. In addition to several products being commercialized in Japan, we are advancing an extensive pipeline of over 30 active programs from discovery through to late clinical stage internally and in partnership with leading pharma and biotech companies. This pipeline is focused on addressing major unmet needs in some of the fastest-growing areas of medicine across neurology, GI and immunology, metabolic disorders and rare diseases, and leverages the power of our unique and industry leading GPCR-targeted structure-based drug discovery NxWave platform to provide a sustainable source of best- or first-in-class candidates.

Nxera employs over 350 talented people at key locations in Tokyo and Osaka (Japan), London and Cambridge (UK), Basel (Switzerland) and Seoul (South Korea) and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (ticker: 4565). For more information, please visit www.nxera.life.

PrecisionLife is a pioneering precision medicine company changing the way the world predicts, prevents, and treats complex, chronic diseases by finding better, more personalized diagnostic and treatment options for patients across the biopharma and healthcare value chain. Our combinatorial analytics platform is unique in its ability to identify causal biology and link chronic disease patients to effective treatments via the molecular mechanism of their disease or drug response. These insights enable us to discover new subgroups of patients with mechanism-based patient stratification biomarkers, identify novel treatment opportunities for unmet medical needs, de-risk and accelerate clinical trials, find new applications for existing drug programs, and build highly predictive complementary diagnostics, personalized risk prediction and disease prevention tools. For more information, visit precisionlife.com.