NEW YORK – NImmune Biopharma will collaborate with the Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML) Institute to advance its pipeline of lanthionine synthetase C-like (LANCL) precision immunoregulatory therapies.
The collaboration, announced Wednesday, grants NImmune access to NIMML's TITAN-X computational modeling and artificial intelligence platform and to the institute's preclinical, translational, and clinical R&D and regulatory infrastructure.
Under the terms of the agreement, NIMML will use TITAN-X to implement biomarker-driven approaches in NImmune's upcoming clinical trials related to the company's LANCL therapeutics.
NIMML will receive up to $15 million in R&D funding from NImmune for costs associated with the collaboration. NImmune will be solely responsible for further developing and commercializing any biomarker-driven therapeutics advanced using the TITAN-X platform. In the deal, NIMML is also eligible for future regulatory and commercial milestone payments, as well as tiered single-digit royalties on global product sales related to NImmune's therapeutic pipeline.
"Our collaboration with the NIMML Institute is a natural extension of NImmune's research and development strategy to create safer and more effective immunoregulatory therapeutics that address the unmet clinical needs of patients with autoimmune diseases," NImmune CEO and Founder Josep Bassaganya-Riera said in a statement.
Blacksburg, Virginia-based NImmune launched in March, having obtained the rights to Landos Biopharma's portfolio of immunoregulatory therapeutic assets. These include omilancor, NImmune's lead clinical candidate treatment for ulcerative colitis.
"Our team has already identified novel gene expression signatures that predict the response to treatment for Phase III-ready omilancor in ulcerative colitis and Phase II-ready NIM-1324 in lupus," Bassaganya-Riera said. "Through our strategic partnership with NIMML, we plan to accelerate the clinical testing and validation of therapeutically relevant gene clusters as biomarkers of response to treatment for omilancor and NIM-1324 in blood and tissue biopsies to determine which patients are most likely to benefit from the LANCL medications and, just as importantly, which are not."