Insilico Medicine, an artificial intelligence company developing end-to-end drug discovery pipelines for age-related diseases and TARA Biosystems, Inc. a company offering "heart-on-a-chip" tissue models for drug discovery and risk assessment applications, announced today the launch of a collaboration to discover and develop novel therapies for cardiac disease and diseases associated with cardiac muscle aging.
The discovery and development of new drugs for cardiac disease requires significant time and capital. The unique collaboration will address this significant global health problem by combining Insilico Medicine's rapid discovery capabilities with the power of TARA's human-relevant tissue models, shaving off years and associated expense and incorporating clinically-relevant physiology early and consistently throughout preclinical development.
"At TARA, we engineer human cardiac tissue to mimic specific human disease phenotypes which are used to validate novel targets and rapidly evaluate new compounds for positive effects on cardiac function. Partnering with Insilico Medicine further maximizes TARA's cardiac drug discovery platform," states Misti Ushio, PhD, CEO of TARA Biosystems. "We feel privileged to be working with Insilico Medicine and have been duly impressed by their technical, scientific and business expertise."
"At Insilico Medicine, we interrogate hundreds of disease-relevant assays on a regular basis to identify those biological systems that we can trust to validate the targets and molecules identified using our end-to-end drug discovery pipelines. TARA's cardiac tissue models are the next best thing to a human heart. Serendipitously, they have one of the most professional and agile management teams that we have encountered during our quest for the best assays. This kind of partnership between AI companies and engineered biology companies is very new and we are extremely excited to partner with TARA Biosystems, a team with a good heart," said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine.
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