Ono Pharmaceutical and twoXAR Announce Drug Discovery Research Collaboration

March 18, 2019 Off By BusinessWire

OSAKA, Japan & MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–lt;a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ai?src=hash" target="_blank"gt;#ailt;/agt;–Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., a Japanese pharmaceutical research and
development company, and twoXAR, Inc., an artificial intelligence
(AI)-driven biopharmaceutical company, announced today that the
companies have signed a drug discovery research collaboration to jointly
discover and develop novel, efficacious treatments to address unmet
medical needs in a specific neurological disease.

Under the agreement, twoXAR will use its proprietary AI technology to
identify a set of lead compounds which demonstrate a novel mechanism of
action and will be further optimized by Ono for potential drug
candidates. twoXAR will also predict a set of hypotheses which suggest
the efficacy and safety of such lead compounds for the therapy. twoXAR
and Ono will select several compounds with their hypotheses from this
set to test in further validation studies. Ono will retain exclusive
rights to develop and commercialize the compounds obtained through this
collaboration throughout the world, and in return, twoXAR will receive
research and license fees from Ono as well as development and sales
milestones.

“As we expand our portfolio of drug discovery programs through
collaborations with experienced drug development teams, we are honored
to enter this collaboration with Ono Pharmaceutical. Ono has a rich
history in drug development, and our partnership represents their
continual commitment to improve efficiency in R&D,” stated Andrew A.
Radin, Co-Founder and CEO of twoXAR. “twoXAR continues to grow its drug
development partnerships internationally and this collaboration with Ono
represents our second with a globally-operating, Japan-headquartered
partner.”

“We highly value twoXAR’s approach to help drug discovery because it
enables rapid identification and in vitro and in vivo
efficacy validation of new lead compounds,” said Toichi Takino,
Corporate Officer Executive Director, Discovery & Research. “By
combining Ono’s drug discovery experience and twoXAR’s AI technology, we
believe that we can increase the speed and probability of success in
discovering and developing innovative first-in-class drugs to expand our
neurological disease pipeline.”

About twoXAR

twoXAR is an artificial intelligence-driven biopharmaceutical company
that leverages its computational platform to identify promising drug
candidates, de-risk the opportunities through preclinical studies, and
progress drug product candidates into the clinic through industry
partnerships. Based in Mountain View, California, the twoXAR team
includes experts in drug discovery and development, biomedical
informatics, computational biology, data science and software
development. Investors in twoXAR include SoftBank Ventures, the
Andreessen Horowitz Bio Fund, OS Fund, CLI Ventures, and the
Stanford-StartX Fund. For more information, please visit www.twoXAR.com.

About Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.

Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., headquartered in Osaka, Japan, is an
R&D-oriented pharmaceutical company committed to create innovative
medicines in specific areas. It focuses especially on the oncology and
diabetes areas. For more information, please visit the company’s website
at http://www.ono.co.jp/eng/index.html.