Nxera Pharma and PrecisionLife Expand Strategic R&D Partnership into New Therapeutic Area

·        Expansion of existing partnership will utilize novel insights into causal biology within auto-immune disorders to identify novel targets for drug discovery

Tokyo, Japan, Oxford and Cambridge, UK, 30 May 2024 - Nxera Pharma Co. Ltd (“Nxera”; TSE 4565) and PrecisionLife, the Causal AI precision medicine company, today announce the expansion of their strategic R&D partnership into auto-immune disorders with the potential to identify new drug targets for the treatment of complex, chronic conditions.

This is the latest in a series of collaborative agreements between Nxera and PrecisionLife, which began in 2022. The partnership aims to establish new drug targets and subsequently potential precision targeted therapies for auto-immune disorders, each linked to subgroups of patients by PrecisionLife’s mechanism-based patient stratification biomarkers.

PrecisionLife finds combinations of biological features that together are associated with disease risk and/or protective effects. These combinations, along with mechanistic biomarkers and causal biology insights to identify which patients will respond to treatment, may empower Nxera to more accurately position known and novel targets for the right responder populations in each target product profile.

Matt Barnes, EVP, President of Nxera Pharma UK and Head of R&D, commented: “PrecisionLife’s platform for enabling unique insight into disease biology supports our approach to identify the ‘right’ drug target and patient subgroups to leverage our world-leading discovery and early development capabilities and increase our probability of success to provide more effective treatments for patients.”

Steve Gardner, CEO, PrecisionLife, added: “PrecisionLife is delighted to strengthen and expand its ongoing target discovery and translation partnership with Nxera Pharma, supporting them to accelerate the development of life-changing medicines for patients. It’s fantastic to have partners like Nxera who share our vision for making precision medicine a reality in chronic diseases, driven by our greater understanding of complex disease biology.”