Two European-based biotechs—Indivi of Switzerland and Clouds of Care of Belgium—have inked a collaboration deal with the goal of leveraging precision medicine tools to boost the early phase of treatments targeting neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
The partnership is in line with the European Medicines Agency’s target of developing new guidelines for early Alzheimer’s trials that emphasizes more responsive and clinically important endpoints in early clinical trial phases.
Developing neurodegeneration drugs is one of the most difficult challenges in medicine, the companies said in an Oct. 15 press release, with low probabilities of technical and regulatory success.
“Age being the principal risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases, we are facing a global pandemic,” Michel Vounatsos, chairman of Clouds of Care, said in the release. “Deep phenotyping technologies will be essential to improve drug development success in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease and extend healthy brain aging across the lifespan.”
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The two organizations plan to combine their respective expertise in neuro-electrophysiology with digital health technology tools in order to create a unified R&D framework for multimodal deep phenotyping that combines biological (electrophysiology-based) and functional (cognitive and motor behavior) measures to produce earlier, more definitive proof-of-biology and proof-of-concept signals in early drug development trials.
Financial terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed.
“It is not just about bringing deep phenotyping technologies together,” Shibeshih Mitiku Belachew, M.D., Ph.D., Indivi’s chief medical officer, said. “It is about creating a true symbiosis between clinical development and the science of enabling technologies to design smarter, faster, and more successful trials.”
The Indivi and Clouds of Care partnership falls just a day after Google’s life science sister company Verily cemented a partnership with UCHealth and the University of Colorado Anschutz to build artificial intelligence models for clinical research that will initially focus on oncology, cardiovascular, neuroscience and transplant medicine.
Verily has been zeroing in on digital precision medicine and clinical research platforms for the past two years after launching its Workbench program in 2023. Workbench is a platform developed to collate and analyze biomedical data gathered from multiple sources aimed at researchers, biopharma developers and other organizations.
