Artificial intelligence will be used to perform molecular analysis of biopsies from unidentified Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients in a bid to help those with immune diseases and cancer.
Athos Therapeutics, a late-stage preclinical, California-based biotech company uses artificial intelligence to develop small molecule therapeutics for immune-mediated diseases and cancer, announced this week (July 11) a comprehensive Master Research Agreement for a collaborative project on IBD with Lahey Hospital Centre, in Massachusetts, US. The collaboration is intended to advance systems biology and computational analyses in the field of IBD.
Novel molecular targets
Dimitrios Iliopoulos, CEO at Lahey said: “We are excited to collaborate with Dr. Randall Pellish and his team to identify novel molecular targets and subtypes of IBD patients. Lahey’s IBD patient biomaterials will be fed into our Athos Learning Computational Ensemble (ALCE) engine to further elucidate the complexity of IBD and the heterogeneity of drug responses.”
Athos will perform multi-omic molecular and genetic analyses using biopsies from archived and de-identified Lahey IBD patient samples with the following clinical descriptions: Crohn’s disease (CD) active, CD inactive (in remission), Ulcerative colitis (UC) active, UC inactive (in remission), and controls. The results of the biopsy analyses will be correlated with detailed clinical information including the patient’s age, sex, disease location, prior treatments, and status.
The research project will allow the hospital to work on finding new ways of classifying and treating IBD, says its director of the IBD Center, Randall Pellish.
Collaborative project
He added: “We are very excited about our research initiatives with Athos Therapeutics. This collaborative research project will allow us to work on vital questions addressing new ways of classifying and treating inflammatory bowel disease with the goal of developing meaningful, perhaps paradigm shifting, treatment strategies.”
Athos Therapeutics’ mission is to develop first-in-class medications that will significantly impact the lives of patients with autoimmune disorders, chronic inflammatory diseases, and cancer.
Allan Pantuck, chairman and founder at Lahey, said: “Athos Therapeutics is developing a precision medicine approach to the treatment of IBD and other autoimmune disorders. The availability of high-quality tissue resources linked to verified clinical data, which forms the basis for our collaboration with Lahey Hospital, will make this possible and allow for the identification of new disease sub-types and for the identification of novel drug targets.”