NEW YORK – Ordaōs and Yatiri Bio on Monday said they will jointly develop two new precision oncology drugs for acute myeloid leukemia patients.
In the collaboration, Yatiri, based in San Diego, will identify cell surface targets for high-risk AML patients using its proteomics knowledgebase. Ordaōs, based in New York, will use its discovery platform, dubbed Design Engine, to create a panel of in silico de novo protein candidates against these targets and validate them in vitro. Once the targets are validated, Ordaōs and Yatiri will jointly develop these candidates with the goal of submitting an investigational new drug application with the US Food and Drug Administration.
Ordaōs' Design Engine involves creating customized miniPRO proteins from billions of protein sequences and structures and then rapidly evaluating them in vitro to assess their structure, binding specificity and affinity, solubility, stability, immunogenicity, and developability. Ordaōs claims that the protein candidates that emerge from this process are less expensive to develop and test than traditional proteins and are less likely to cause adverse side effects. The firm then partners with drugmakers to develop these miniPRO proteins into therapeutics.
Yatiri, meanwhile, uses a platform that links patients' clinical data and proteomic data to ex vivo model systems to identify therapeutic targets and subsets of patients who respond to those treatments.
"By working together with Ordaōs, we have the potential to accelerate the development of a novel therapeutic for patients with AML whose current treatment options are very poor," Yatiri CEO Pilgrim Jackson said in a statement. "Our philosophy is that a global, unbiased evaluation of patient-level data using proteomics and the integration of highly curated metadata results in a far more direct path to producing treatments and identification of the groups for whom these treatments will be most effective."