Orbis Medicines & Vivtex Form Research & Exclusive Licensing Collaboration
Orbis Medicines recently announced a research collaboration and option to an exclusive license with Vivtex, a biotech company aiming to transform the development of oral biologic therapies for major diseases. The collaboration will enable Orbis to utilize Vivtex’s GI-ORIS platform for gut permeability screening to evaluate the oral bioavailability of Orbis’ portfolio of next-generation macrocycle drugs it calls “nCycles.”
“This collaboration extends our ability to design for oral bioavailability into later stages of preclinical development with Vivtex’s extensively validated ex vivo porcine gut model, which is highly informative for human gut interactions. Our goal is faster development of the highest quality candidates possible for clinical entry as we work towards bringing a new generation of macrocycle drugs to patients,” said Simon Feldbæk, Managing Director and Chief Development Officer at Orbis.
Under the agreement, the companies will collaborate on permeability screens of Orbis’ nCycles. nCycles are systematically designed by Orbis’ “nGen” platform to be orally bioavailable and membrane permeable, both decades-long challenges in macrocycle drug design. The Orbis pipeline includes programs against targets validated by blockbuster biologic drugs, with the goal of providing oral alternatives that will enable the treatment of many more patients.
“We welcome this collaboration in the resurgent field of orally available macrocycles, which GI-ORIS is perfectly suited to supporting through its focus on providing developers with large-scale, physiologically relevant data at speed,” said Maureen Deehan, CEO of Vivtex. “The versatility of macrocyclic compounds points to a wide array of potential therapeutic applications if reliable oral bioavailability can be achieved, and Vivtex would be proud to play a role in delivering that potential new class of therapies to patients.”
Vivtex’s proprietary platform, called the gastrointestinal robotic interface system (GI-ORIS™), enables researchers to capture the entire complexity of the GI tract in a microwell plate that can be used for fully automated screening experiments. This enables the testing of thousands of samples in a single day, which would take multiple years without the technology.
Orbis Medicines is a biotechnology company focused on pioneering a new era for oral macrocycle drug discovery. Macrocycles are a large and diverse family of compounds with highly desirable therapeutic properties. Orbis’ nGen platform is designed to systematically explore the macrocycle chemical space using a highly automated chemistry platform and deliver oral macrocycle drug candidates – nCycles – suitable for both intra- and extracellular targets. Orbis’ programs are focused on high-value oral alternatives to blockbuster biologic drugs and targets challenging for established modalities. Orbis was founded by Novo Holdings. For more information, visit www.orbismedicines.com.
nGen is Orbis’ technology platform for generating oral macrocycle drug candidates, which it calls nCycles. It consists of multiple proprietary integrated elements starting with hit finding libraries of 100 billion compounds. Hits identified are progressed using Orbis’ highly automated chemistry-based platform that rapidly creates and tests hundreds of thousands of individual analogues with a full suite of assays to identify the most desirable ones. The scale and quality of the data produced from these real compounds, paired with machine learning, creates an industry-leading platform that de-risks and accelerates development. Recently published research in Nature Chemical Biology demonstrates nGen’s ability to deliver nCycles that are orally bioavailable, marking a new era for macrocycle drug discovery.
Vivtex was launched as a spin out from the labs of Robert Langer (MIT) and Giovanni Traverso (MIT, Harvard Medical School). The company, located in Cambridge, MA, USA and Schlieren, Switzerland, is focused on transforming the market for biologic therapies through the development of novel oral biologics including enhanced, oral versions of existing high-value biologic candidates that can only be administered by injection or infusion.
To achieve its mission, Vivtex is leveraging its proprietary and extensively validated high-throughput GI-ORIS™ screening, formulation and AI-enabling platform (Nat. Biomed. Eng. 4, 544–559: 2020) through strategic partnerships and R&D collaborations with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. For more information, visit www.vivtex.com.
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