NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – TwoXar said today that it is collaborating with researchers in the University of Chicago's department of medicine to identify and investigate new medicines for treating atherosclerosis.
The institution will use TwoXar's computational discovery software to integrate and analyze biomedical datasets to suggest likely drug candidates that could improve vascular endothelial health and prevent atherosclerosis. The company's software searches for associations between disease and drug candidates and ranks high-probability disease-to-candidate matches. These matches can be used to prioritize existing candidates, perform target searches, and identify candidates for further testing.
Researchers from the university will verify the efficacy of the selected candidates in pre-clinical studies using cultured endothelial cells and then animal models of atherosclerosis. "Better medicines that not only address the symptoms of atherosclerosis, but help prevent it all together, represents an important opportunity to help millions of people around the world who suffer from the health effects of arterial plaque buildup," Yun Fang, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, said in a statement. "Multi-disciplinary approaches, including those driven by technology, have the potential to elucidate novel disease mechanisms and further support the development of new medicines."
Financial and other terms of the partnership were not disclosed.
Recently, TwoXar announced a similar partnership with Stanford University's dermatology department to identify new drug candidates for rare dermatological disorders such as lymphatic malformation and epidermolysis bullosa simplex.