Scipher Medicine to expand into autoimmune disease therapeutics
pharmafile | April 30, 2021 | News story | Medical Communications | AI, autoimmune diseases
Scipher Medicine, a precision immunology company, announced the launch on Scipher Therapeutics on Thursday, marking the company’s shift towards the autoimmune disease therapeutics market.
Scipher Therapeutics will aim to develop new-in-class precision therapeutics in autoimmune diseases, through their artificial intelligence (AI) technology and clinico-genomic data in order to target specific patient populations with high response rates.
Slava Akmaev, PhD, current CTO and Head of Therapeutics at Scipher Medicine, is set to lead the project. She said: “Our breakthrough approach combines extensive patient-level molecular data and our proprietary Spectra platform, powered by the state-of-the-art AI algorithms.
“Our methodology was developed to explain the complex biology of autoimmune diseases and is ideal for discovering novel therapeutic targets with the potential to treat patient subpopulations, including those not responding to currently available therapies.”
Autoimmune diseases are marred with low drug response rates, mainly due to an inability to understand patient disease biology. The response rate for the largest selling drug class in the world for example, anti-TNF therapy, is below 40%.
Companies such as Scipher have been working in the autoimmune space in recent years to develop blood-based biomarkers to predict response to existing approved anti-TNF drugs in autoimmune diseases.
Artifical intelligence is a key tool being used by Scipher through their platform, Spectra, to analyse large patient molecular datasets in order to understand how proteins expressed from the human genome interact to cause specific disease phenotypes.
Alif Saleh, CEO of Scipher Medicine, said: “We have seen in oncology how precision medicine has transformed drug discovery and made the development process faster, more cost-effective, and predictable to the benefit of patients. Spectra brings the same capabilities to autoimmune diseases which have eluded the industry for decades.”
Kat Jenkins
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