01 May, 2018

Collaboration with C4X Discovery Holdings PLC

e-Therapeutics PLC (ETX.L) announces collaboration with C4X Discovery Holdings PLC (C4X.L) to discover novel strategies for the treatment of Parkinson's disease.

e-therapeutics plc (AIM: ETX, "e-therapeutics" or the "Company"), the network-driven computational drug discovery company, today announces that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with C4X Discovery Holdings PLC (C4X.L) ("C4XD") to combine its drug discovery platform with the latter's genomics capabilities. The collaboration will aim to identify novel intervention strategies that have potential in the treatment of Parkinson's disease ("PD"), a debilitating and progressive neurological disease where there remains a significant unmet medical need.

The collaboration is based on leveraging the power of e-therapeutics' proprietary Network-Driven Drug Discovery (NDD) platform with C4XD's Taxonomy3 technology, C4XD's innovative DNA-based target identification platform that utilises human genetic datasets to identify novel patient-specific targets.

Taxonomy3 has already identified 180 novel disease-associated genes for PD. Using these results, e-therapeutics will apply its pioneering NDD platform to derive new insights into the corresponding cellular mechanisms in order to understand their interplay and centrality in the pathology of the disease. It is hoped that this work will ultimately lead to the identification of new treatment strategies, molecular targets and ultimately, novel drugs.

There is currently no cure for Parkinson's disease, which is estimated to affect c.10 million people worldwide1

Results generated in the collaboration shall be jointly owned by e-therapeutics and C4XD. The financial terms of the agreement are undisclosed. 

We are delighted to be entering into this collaboration with C4XD, which has the ultimate ambition of discovering novel drugs for Parkinson's Disease, a debilitating and progressive condition where there remains a significant unmet medical need for truly effective treatments. In addition to validating our Network-Driven Drug Discovery (NDD) approach in multiple, diverse areas of biology, we have also been working on genome-based functionality of our NDD platform, in a number of areas including triple negative breast cancer.

Our NDD platform is a unique approach that interrogates complex biology in a fundamentally different way. Our aim is to use the genomic associations that C4XD's Taxonomy3 technology platform has uncovered, to create new therapeutic approaches to treat this devastating disease.

There is potentially an exciting technological synergy between our approaches and we are looking forward to combining our expertise and working together.

Ray Barlow

CEO

1European Parkinson's Disease Association.