Adynxx and twoXAR Form Collaboration to Discover and Develop Treatments for Endometriosis
Adynxx and twoXAR announced an agreement to develop an oral, non-hormonal drug therapy with the potential to address the underlying mechanisms of endometriosis and significantly improve upon the standard of care.
Under the agreement, twoXAR will use its proprietary AI technology to identify a set of drug candidates with the potential to treat or prevent the recurrence of endometriosis and associated symptoms. Adynxx will select candidates from this set to test for efficacy using in vivo models of endometriosis based on predetermined criteria. Following identification of one or more candidates based on those evaluated in vivo, Adynxx intends to conduct preclinical characterization work, IND-enabling work and clinical development. Further details of the agreement were not disclosed.
Endometriosis is an inflammatory disease that affects 176 million women worldwide and is characterized by abnormal growth of endometrial-like tissue outside the uterus. It is associated with a range of symptoms including chronic pelvic pain, dysmenorrhea, dyspareunia, subfertility and hyperalgesia. Current treatment options consist of hormonal therapies, analgesics and surgery, with medications generally being the first and most common option. It is estimated that endometriosis will affect one in 10 women of reproductive age, with approximately 4.4 million women having been laparoscopically diagnosed in the US alone, making endometriosis one of the most common gynecologic disorders in the US.
“Cutting-edge AI technologies like twoXAR’s can help generate a new understanding of biology and provide a sensitive prediction of the therapeutic benefit of potential drug candidates,” said Julien Mamet, PhD, founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Adynxx. “This collaboration is part of our plan to build a diverse pipeline of promising therapies to address unmet medical needs in pain and inflammatory diseases such as endometriosis. We believe the discovery strategy designed with twoXAR will allow us to identify and develop compounds with an accelerated timeline, decreased risk and reduced costs to address a serious health problem impacting millions of women in the US and worldwide.”
“The combination of twoXAR’s unique capabilities in drug discovery with the Adynxx team’s clinical and drug development experience in pain, inflammation and women’s health enables an efficient discovery and development path for new therapies to reduce the burden of symptoms and directly target the disease biology,” said Andrew A. Radin, Co-Founder and CEO of twoXAR. “This collaboration with Adynxx expands the scope of our portfolio of disease programs to include specific indications within the therapeutic area of fibrotic diseases.”