CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 25, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Immuneering Corporation today announced a collaboration between its neuroscience division, known as Alleo Labs, and Astex Pharmaceuticals (UK), a wholly owned subsidiary of Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., to identify novel therapeutic targets for an undisclosed neurodegenerative disease.
The collaboration will leverage Immuneering’s decade of experience in bioinformatics and computational biology to redefine how a disease is treated by using human gene expression data to identify clinically actionable patient subsets with distinct biology. Once identified, Immuneering will apply its proprietary Disease Cancelling Technology to systematically identify a series of targets that counteract distinct aspects of the disease biology. Astex will fund the research collaboration and has an option to exclusively license the results for further drug discovery research and development. Financial terms are not disclosed.
“Building on the success of our work in Alzheimer’s, we are excited to collaborate with the world-class team at Astex to help redefine the treatment for another neurodegenerative disease as a syndrome,” said Jermaine Ross, Ph.D., head of neuroscience research at Immuneering. “Using our knowledge of the distinct underlying causes, we then aim to identify a series of robust targets to pursue for each subset of patients with this progressive neurological disease, which currently has no effective treatments to halt or reverse its progression.”
The research is modeled on an approach that Immuneering’s Alleo Labs Division has successfully applied to develop the company’s wholly owned pipeline of drug programs for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and leverages the same proprietary platform that Immuneering has utilized for its oncology and immuno-oncology pipelines. Alleo Labs has integrated brain gene expression and AD pathology data to stratify patients into subgroups with unique biology and identify targets specific to these subgroups.
David Rees, Ph.D., FRSC, FMedSci, chief scientific officer of Astex (UK), said, “We are delighted to begin our work with Immuneering to identify novel targets against this devastating disease. By combining our expertise in central nervous system diseases with Immuneering’s technology capable of reversing disease signals, we hope to identify novel targets with a higher likelihood of success that may ultimately allow us to discover and advance new medicines for patients.”
About Immuneering Corporation
Immuneering aims to systematically create highly effective medicines by applying proprietary bioinformatics to create and advance pipelines of novel compounds that cancel disease signals. Its current pipelines of drug candidates are in oncology (with an initial focus on novel ways to target the RAS/RAF/MEK pathway), neuroscience, and immuno-oncology. Utilizing its proprietary computational Disease Cancelling Technology, the company engineers pipelines of medicines that reverse a disease signal across many relevant genes. Immuneering’s technologies have proven exceptionally rapid and capital-efficient in creating its pipelines. Concurrent with its internal programs, the company provides unparalleled computational biology services to leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Corporate Contact:
Rebecca Kusko, Ph.D.
Immuneering Corporation
617-500-8080
rkusko@immuneering.com
Media Contact:
Meredith Sosulski, Ph.D.
LifeSci Communications
929-469-3851
msosulski@lifescicomms.com
