Orbis Medicines, a leader in oral macrocycle drug discovery, has announced a research collaboration and option to an exclusive license with Vivtex, a biotech company aiming to transform the development of oral biologic therapies for major diseases. The collaboration will enable Orbis to utilize Vivtex’s GI-ORIS™ platform for gut permeability screening to evaluate the oral bioavailability of Orbis’ portfolio of next-generation macrocycle drugs it calls ‘nCycles’.
“This collaboration extends our ability to design for oral bioavailability into later stages of preclinical development with Vivtex’s extensively validated ex vivo porcine gut model, which is highly informative for human gut interactions. Our goal is faster development of the highest quality candidates possible for clinical entry as we work towards bringing a new generation of macrocycle drugs to patients,” said Simon Feldbæk, Managing Director and Chief Development Officer at Orbis.
Under the agreement, the companies will collaborate on permeability screens of Orbis’ nCycles. nCycles are systematically designed by Orbis’ “nGen” platform to be orally bioavailable and membrane permeable, both decades-long challenges in macrocycle drug design. The Orbis pipeline includes programs against targets validated by blockbuster biologic drugs, with the goal of providing oral alternatives that will enable the treatment of many more patients.
“We welcome this collaboration in the resurgent field of orally available macrocycles, which GI-ORIS™ is perfectly suited to supporting through its focus on providing developers with large-scale, physiologically relevant data at speed,” said Maureen Deehan, CEO of Vivtex. “The versatility of macrocyclic compounds points to a wide array of potential therapeutic applications if reliable oral bioavailability can be achieved, and Vivtex would be proud to play a role in delivering that potential new class of therapies to patients.”
Vivtex’s proprietary platform, called the gastrointestinal robotic interface system (GI-ORIS™), enables researchers to capture the entire complexity of the GI tract in a microwell plate that can be used for fully automated screening experiments. This enables the testing of thousands of samples in a single day, which would take multiple years without the technology.
