twoXAR, Stanford University Announce Collaboration

twoXAR, Inc. has announced a collaboration with Joyce Teng, MD, PhD, of the Department of Dermatology at Stanford University to support research focused on the identification of drug candidates targeting rare disorders such as lymphatic malformation and epidermolysis bullosa simplex (EBS). As part of this collaboration, twoXAR will help fund some of the collection and analysis of disease-specific gene expression data, which will be made available to the global research community and used to power disease-to-candidate predictions using the company’s discovery platform.

Dr. Teng, Director of Pediatric Dermatology, is leading vital research aimed at improving treatment options and care outcomes for rare diseases. A significant challenge faced by the rare disease community is access to sufficient data to power meaningful investigations into disease mechanisms and new therapies. Through their study of diseases like lymphatic malformation and EBS, Dr. Teng’s team will compile the most comprehensive compendiums of biomedical data available for these disorders.

“As is the case with many rare diseases, EBS and lymphatic malformation have no FDA approved medications and our best current treatment options consist of supportive care or surgeries to improve symptoms,” said Dr. Teng. “We are pleased to be working with twoXAR in this preclinical study collaboration as we strive to change the outcome for people living with rare and often incredibly painful and disabling diseases like lymphatic malformation and EBS.”

twoXAR has developed patent-pending algorithms that enable it to find unanticipated associations between disease and drug candidates orders of magnitudes faster than wet lab-based approaches. The company’s integrative biomedical software platform rapidly evaluates massive public and proprietary datasets to identify and rank high probability disease-to-candidate matches. These matches can then be used to prioritize existing candidates, perform targeted searches and identify novel drug candidates for further preclinical and clinical testing.

The platform is disease agnostic and has been tested on more than 40 conditions to date in therapeutic areas including autoimmune, oncologic, and neurologic disorders. “This is an exciting opportunity to support patients and demonstrate how our technology can be used to identify potential new treatments faster and more cost-effectively than previous approaches,” said Andrew A. Radin, co-founder and CEO of twoXAR.

“Through our work with Dr. Teng, we hope to develop additional expertise that will pave the way for investigating treatments using novel bioinformatics approaches for orphan diseases with unmet needs.”