Biovista Sponsors Wylder Nation Foundation's Research on Acid Sphingomyelinase Deficiency

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia, September 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

Biovista Inc. is glad to announce the sponsoring of the winners of the 2015 BeHEARD science challenge, a global competition hosted by the Rare Genomics Institute that offers rare disease researchers, access to the latest life science innovations and technologies.

Biovista will use its drug repositioning and pathway analytics capability to support Steven Laffoon and his team at Wylder Nation Foundation in the study of Niemann-Pick Disease Type A (NPA), a rare and fatal Lysosomal Storage Disorder also known as Acid Sphingomyelinase Deficiency (ASMD).  Wylder Nation Foundation is dedicated to improving the lives of children diagnosed with Lysosomal Storage Disorders by accelerating the discovery and development of treatment options.

"We are glad to be collaborating with Wylder Nation Foundation on understanding Acid Spingomyelinase Deficiency and more generally Lysosomal Storage Disorders where there is currently a clear unmet medical need. Our COSS platform is well positioned to identify non-obvious mechanisms of what are complex diseases displaying a variety of phenotypes that include onset, severity, and system involvement. We will use our drug repositioning capability to identify a suitable drug or combination of drugs that can successfully reduce sphingomyelin levels especially in the brain, an approach we believe will not only be relevant for NPA but also for several other diseases in which brain accumulation of this lipid occurs." said Dr. Andreas Persidis, CEO of Biovista.  "We will be glad to collaborate with Wylder Nation's experts from around the world on this project which will include individuals from Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Genzyme Corporation." Dr. Persidis added.

About Biovista's Clinical Outcome Search Space (COSS) technology platform. 

The Big Data analytics were carried out using Biovista's COSS technology. COSS integrates Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to correlate over 270,000 clinical outcomes known to medicine, including risk factors, against any gene, drug or combination. This enables the linking of pre-clinical experimental data directly with potential clinical outcomes. COSS is used for systematic drug repositioning and intellectual property generation, and also to identify adverse events, differentiating the causes of adverse events among a drug or the underlying disease.

About Biovista: 

Biovista is a privately held biotechnology company that finds novel uses for drugs and assesses their benefit/risk profile using mechanism-of-action big data analytics.  http://www.biovista.com

http://beheard2015.raregenomics.org/home

SOURCE Biovista Inc.