NEW YORK – Celsius Therapeutics said Wednesday that it has signed collaboration agreements with the University of Oxford in the UK, the Cleveland Clinic in the US, and LMU University Hospital Munich in Germany to apply single-cell analytics technology to research into inflammatory bowel disease.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based vendor will lend its proprietary single-cell genomics platform and machine-learning technology to analyze longitudinal biopsies at three different stages.
Oxford has a cohort of patients on anti-TNFa therapy, Cleveland Clinic is studying those with Crohn's disease who have a recurrence following intestinal resection, while LMU has collected samples of children with very early-onset IBD, the company said. Celsius will integrate single-cell RNA sequencing data from these tissue samples with clinical data in pursuit of novel drug targets and other therapeutic approaches.
Celsius said it would add the deidentified clinical records and longitudinal single-cell genomics data produced by these studies to its existing database to improve its machine-learning algorithms. The firm also said that it would combine its new learnings with its orthogonal datasets from functional genomics to verify the biological mechanisms of its findings with the three new partners.
"Analyzing the rich single-cell data generated from more than 600 samples that will be collected across these collaborations will enable the creation of a unique database with depth and breadth previously unrealized in the field," Celsius CSO Jeanne Magram said in a statement.
"IBD is heterogeneous, and we believe that connecting the insights gained across these different settings will lead to a new understanding of disease and facilitate the discovery of new drug targets for specific patient subsets," added CEO Tariq Kassum.