NImmune Biopharma (“NImmune”), a late-clinical-stage precision immunology biopharmaceutical company that develops novel best-in-class biomarker-driven immunoregulatory therapeutics, today announced a research collaboration with BioTherapeutics, Inc. (“BioTherapeutics”), a clinical-stage biotech company that combines advanced computational modeling with translational and clinical experimentation to accelerate the development of novel products. The collaboration strengthens NImmune’s precision immunology capabilities by providing access to BioTherapeutics’ preclinical services and regulatory capabilities for product testing, mechanism of action validation studies, and development of animal and computational models of inflammatory and autoimmune disease. NImmune will also gain access to BioTherapeutics’ proprietary animal models of disease, including its unique pig models of IBD, PK/PD analysis capabilities and expert regulatory infrastructure.
Dr. Raquel Hontecillas, BioTherapeutics Chief Scientific Officer, stated, “We are excited to collaborate across teams in support of the development of much-needed therapeutics by providing our highly sophisticated computational and preclinical services, including our proprietary efficacy animal models of autoimmune and inflammatory disease. The unique drug development ecosystem created here in Blacksburg enables and equips our organizations to develop safer and more effective therapeutics at an increasingly efficient and accelerated pace.”
NImmune’s partnership with BioTherapeutics complements an existing R&D partnership with NIMML Institute, creating a unique scientific innovation ecosystem for transdisciplinary teams to collaborate from discovery through various development phases. This ecosystem demonstrated significant clinical and commercial success this year with BioTherapeutics and NIMML Institute having enabled the development of NX-13 and its acquisition by AbbVie, Inc. (NYSE: ABBV).
“The collaboration with BioTherapeutics is a crucial extension of NImmune’s innovative R&D ecosystem that is enabling our team to create safer and more effective immunoregulatory therapeutics that address the unmet clinical needs of patients with inflammatory and autoimmune diseases,” said Dr. Josep Bassaganya-Riera, Founder & CEO of NImmune. “Through NImmune’s strategic partnerships with both the NIMML Institute and BioTherapeutics, we have created a best-in-class scientific ecosystem capable of accelerating the pipeline—from A.I.-enabled target discovery and validation using the TITAN-X platform to preclinical animal modeling to clinical testing and ultimately commercialization. The regulatory infrastructure, preclinical resources, and leading proprietary models of disease and pathology developed and honed at BioTherapeutics allow us to focus NImmune’s organizational energy squarely on advancing clinical development of our immunoregulatory therapeutic pipeline.”
“We’re proud to enter this strategic partnership, which combines BioTherapeutics’ validated models of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases with our expertise in rapidly translating fundamental scientific discoveries in immunology into safer and more effective medicines for patients with immune-mediated diseases such as ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and systemic lupus erythematosus,” continued Dr. Bassaganya-Riera. “We look forward to the ongoing collaboration between BioTherapeutics and NImmune, as well as the NIMML Institute, to significantly accelerate the clinical development of our high-conviction drug candidates.”
Learn more here.