Verge Genomics, Eli Lilly partner to develop ALS therapies

Verge Genomics has announced a three-year partnership with Eli Lilly and Company to discover and develop novel therapies for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disease.

As part of the collaboration, Verge plans to apply its all-in-human platform to discover and validate new targets for ALS, which currently has no cure.

This platform is based on the collection of transcriptomes from patient brain across various neurodegenerative diseases.

It can provide insights into novel causal disease mechanisms in genetically segmented patient populations and enable the discovery of therapeutic targets.

Eli Lilly and Company Neurodegeneration Research vice-president Michael Hutton said: “Verge Genomics is advancing an innovative approach to identifying high-potential drug targets that are validated through artificial intelligence algorithms and a large library of human data.”

The company will select up to four targets, which will be identified by Verge using its human-based discovery capabilities based on the insights, to advance through clinical development and commercialisation.

Under the deal, Verge will receive upfront, equity investment and potential near-term payments of about $25m along with $694m of additional milestone payments and potential downstream royalties.

Verge Genomics CEO and co-founder Alice Zhang said: “Lilly’s focus and leadership in neurology matches well with Verge’s ability to identify high-potential targets for devastating neurological diseases.

“Through this partnership with Lilly, we will examine the use of human data and machine learning to potentially overcome translational hurdles in historically challenging diseases with complex biology.”

One of the major challenges in the treatment of ALS is said to be the underlying complex biology and lack of predictive animal models.

Verge noted that artificial intelligence enables processing and integration of multiple types of human data generated by the technologies and is poised to address diseases with complex biology like ALS.

In a separate development, AstraZeneca has signed an exclusive license agreement with F-star Therapeutics to research, develop and commercialise novel stimulator of interferon genes inhibitors.