NEWYORK (GenomeWeb) – TwoXar has announced a new collaboration with Stanford University School of Medicine that will focus on identifying drug candidates that target hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a primary malignancy of the liver that occurs predominantly in patients with underlying chronic liver disease.
Under the terms of this agreement, TwoXar will work with researchers at the Asian Liver Center — a non-profit organization at Stanford that seeks to address the disproportionately high rates of chronic hepatitis B infection and liver cancer in Asians and Asian Americans — to identify new drug candidates for HCC.
Specifically, the partners will use TwoXar's software to suggest drug-disease predictions that will be validated through preclinical studies by researchers at the center, the company said. TwoXar Co-founder and CEO Andrew Radin said in a statement that the partners hope to identify potential HCC therapies that target a more diverse set of biomarkers than current treatments which primarily target tyrosine kinase inhibitors and have yielded mixed results.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The new partnership expands on a pre-existing arrangement between TwoXar and Stanford. In April, the company announced that it was partnering with the university's dermatology department on a preclinical study aimed at identifying drug candidates for rare dermatological disorders such as lymphatic malformation and epidermolysis bullosa simplex (EBS).