Athos Therapeutics Announces Research Collaboration to Advance Precision Medicine in Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Athos to perform molecular analysis of biopsies from de-identified Inflammatory Bowel Disease patient samples from Lahey Hospital & Medical Center based in Burlington, Massachusetts.

 LOS ANGELES, July 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Athos Therapeutics, Inc. ("Athos"), a late-stage preclinical biotech company using artificial intelligence to develop small molecule therapeutics for immune-mediated diseases and cancer, announced today a comprehensive Master Research Agreement for a collaborative project on Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) with Lahey Hospital & Medical Center ("Lahey"). This collaboration will advance systems biology and computational analyses in the field of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD).

Athos will perform multi-omic molecular and genetic analyses using biopsies from archived and de-identified Lahey IBD patient samples with the following clinical descriptions: Crohn's disease (CD) active, CD inactive (in remission), Ulcerative colitis (UC) active, UC inactive (in remission), and controls. The results of the biopsy analyses will be correlated with detailed clinical information including the patient's age, sex, disease location, prior treatments, and status.

"We are excited to collaborate with Dr. Randall Pellish and his team to identify novel molecular targets and subtypes of IBD patients," said Dimitrios Iliopoulos, PhD, MBA, President & CEO. "Lahey's IBD patient biomaterials will be fed into our Athos Learning Computational Ensemble

(ALCE) engine to further elucidate the complexity of IBD and the heterogeneity of drug responses."

"Athos Therapeutics is developing a precision medicine approach to the treatment of IBD and other autoimmune disorders," said Allan Pantuck, MD, MS, FACS, Chairman, Founder & CMO. "The availability of high-quality tissue resources linked to verified clinical data, which forms the basis for our collaboration with Lahey Hospital, will make this possible and allow for the identification of new disease sub-types and for the identification of novel drug targets." 

"We are very excited about our research initiatives with Athos Therapeutics," said Randall Pellish, MD, Director, Lahey Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center, Division of Gastroenterology, Lahey Hospital and Medical Center. "This collaborative research project will allow us to work on vital questions addressing new ways of classifying and treating inflammatory bowel disease with the goal of developing meaningful, perhaps paradigm shifting, treatment strategies."

The Mission of Athos Therapeutics is to develop first-in-class medications that will significantly impact the lives of patients with autoimmune disorders, chronic inflammatory diseases, and cancer. Athos is a late-stage preclinical biotech company developing small molecule therapeutics for immune-mediated diseases and cancer using artificial intelligence-generated innovative chemistry and computational platforms. The co-founders of Athos include one of the founders of Kite Pharma (acquired for $12B), the medicinal chemist behind two multi-billion-dollar FDA-approved drugs (Xtandi & Erleada), and the discoverer of the miR-124 drug target, currently in a Phase III IBD trial. Athos identifies novel drug targets (hubs) by integrating clinical and molecular datasets into the biological network of a disease (the disease interactome) and matches them to its small molecule computational chemistry platform. ATH-63, the Company's lead drug compound, is moving into a Phase Ia human clinical trial in 2022. The Athos pipeline includes small molecule approaches for various autoimmune disease and cancer. 

Additional information about Athos Therapeutics can be found at https://athostx.com/

SOURCE Athos Therapeutics