San Diego — Aizen Therapeutics announced a multi-program collaboration with an undisclosed San Diego-based public biotechnology company to design oral peptide therapeutics using its DaX artificial intelligence platform.
Under the agreement, Aizen will receive several million dollars in initial revenue and is eligible for up to $100 million in milestone payments for each nominated target.
The collaboration will focus on developing oral peptide therapies for disease-related targets in immunology and neurology.
“Oral biologics represent a new frontier in drug development. We are focused on designing oral peptides for validated biological targets that can deliver an improved therapeutic index, reduced systemic toxicity, and enhanced target engagement in a pill,” said Ajay Kshatriya, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Aizen Therapeutics.
Kshatriya said the collaboration is intended to demonstrate the capabilities of Aizen’s DaX platform against established disease targets.
Aizen, which was spun out of Caltech, developed DaX as a computational platform for peptide design. The company said the model has been trained on millions of annotated molecules and receptors and explores non-canonical amino acid peptide chemistry at a larger scale than traditional discovery approaches.
“With technical challenges in data scarcity and chemical complexity, de novo peptide design is the frontier of Drug Discovery AI,” said David Van Valen, M.D., Ph.D., Aizen Scientific Founder and Caltech Professor. “This collaboration represents a meaningful step for the field, pairing AI peptide design with a world-class biopharma category leader to advance molecules into medicines.”
