Ono Enters into Research Collaboration Agreement with Healx Limited
Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (Osaka, Japan; President, Representative Director, Gyo Sagara; ”Ono”) announced today that it has entered into a research collaboration agreement with Healx Limited (Cambridge, UK; CEO, Tim Guilliams; ”Healx”), an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven biopharmaceutical company, on Healx’s unique AI technology to jointly discover and develop novel, efficacious treatment drugs for diseases with unmet medical needs.
Under the agreement, Healx will use Healnet, the core of Healx’s AI drug discovery platform, to identify potential indications for Ono’s proprietary assets. Ono will select diseases from Healx’s therapeutic recommendations and conduct verification studies on Ono’s compound assets for selected diseases. Ono retains exclusive rights to develop and commercialize our compounds for the indications selected through this collaboration worldwide, and in return, will pay to Healx research fee during the collaboration period, as well as development and sales milestones.
“We extremely appreciate Healx‘s AI technology, Healnet, for discovering new therapies that meet unmet medical needs in rare diseases.” said Toichi Takino, Member of the Board, Senior Executive Officer / Executive Director, Discovery & Research. "By combining the profiling data of new drug candidates and Healx's AI technology, we expect to increase efficiency of finding clinical indications with high prediction accuracy and identifying new drug candidates."
“It is a great privilege to work with a renowned drug discovery company like Ono - especially as they share our mission to bring new, effective treatments to patients in need. We are excited to deploy our technology to expand the number of diseases Ono’s assets can impact and, ultimately, provide novel treatments to patients around the world. We strongly believe in the power of our artificial intelligence platform to deliver disease indication predictions with unprecedented speed, scale and accuracy, and we look forward to having more to share in the coming months.” said Tim Guilliams, CEO of Healx.
About Healnet
Healnet integrates data from multiple sources - including biomedical research, patient insight, scientific literature and curated proprietary information - to form the world’s most detailed rare disease biomedical knowledge graph. This graph is analyzed by Healx’s cutting-edge AI methods to pinpoint non-obvious disease-compound relationships with the highest probability of success. Critically, these models are trained to novel disease biology and modes of action, without being limited to a single biological target.
About Healx
There are 7,000 known rare diseases that affect 400 million people across the globe, but only 5% of those conditions have approved treatments. Healx is an AI-powered, patient-inspired technology company, pioneering the next wave of drug discovery in order to bring novel, effective treatments to rare disease patients around the world. By combining frontier technology with deep drug discovery and development expertise, Healx can accelerate the pace, increase the scale and improve the chance of success of rare disease treatment development in order to meet this huge unmet need and have unprecedented patient impact. Healx was founded in Cambridge, UK, in 2014 by Dr. Tim Guilliams (a Biochemical Engineer and tech entrepreneur), and Dr. David Brown (co-inventor of Viagra and former Global Head of Drug Discovery at Roche). For more information, visit www.healx.io or follow on Twitter and LinkedIn .