Australia's EpiAxis Therapeutics, a leading epigenetics company with a focus on the treatment, diagnosis and monitoring of cancer and the prevention of its recurrence, and US-based Peptilogics, a biotech company engineering peptide therapeutics by combining computation and biology to improve the treatment landscape for patients with life-threatening diseases, have entered a collaboration to leverage AI for drug discovery to inhibit epigenetic oncology targets, aiming to reprogram cancer cells and drive immune reinvigoration.

The collaboration will combine EpiAxis Therapeutics’ deep epigenetic expertise and Peptilogics’ AI platform (Nautilus) to advance drug discovery for cancers that escape existing therapies through epigenetic change, including metastatic breast cancer.

Peptilogics’ Nautilus platform enables in silico predictive peptide design across diverse targets to efficiently access new functional chemical space and design therapeutics. Additionally, Peptilogics’ purpose-built supercomputer accelerates model development, prediction, and evaluation of peptide sequences to produce higher quality hits with greater chance of success.

This strategic partnership follows the recent publication of the results of EpiAxis' pioneering clinical trial EPI-PRIMED in leading cancer journal Frontiers in Oncology. The study was the first time an epigenetic inhibitor has been used in combination with chemotherapy to treat metastatic cancer. The results provided proof of concept for the company’s drug development program for its first-in-class therapies to inhibit nuclear LSD1.