InterAx Biotech

InterAx Biotech is a spin-off from ETH Zurich and the Paul Scher­rer Insti­tute, Switzer­land. The com­pany spe­cial­izes in G Pro­tein-Coupled Receptor (GPCR) drug dis­cov­ery and is recog­nized as the world leader in quant­it­at­ive mech­an­istic under­stand­ing of GPCR drug action. InterAx developed a new math­em­at­ical mod­el­ling approach that resolves the bio­lo­gical mech­an­isms of drug effects at the cell sig­nalling level – thereby address­ing a cru­cial gap in con­ven­tional drug dis­cov­ery. The vast major­ity (90%) of drug can­did­ates fail in clin­ical devel­op­ment, and 50% of the fail­ures are due to the lack of drug effic­acy in humans. This high­lights the insuf­fi­cient under­stand­ing of the bio­logy of drug effects. Coin­cid­ing with this appar­ent know­ledge gap, many pre-clin­ical pro­grams omit detailed char­ac­ter­isa­tion of cell-level responses, and pro­ceed rap­idly from molecu­lar to ADMET and organ­ism-level studies.

InterAx has built an integ­rated pre­clin­ical drug dis­cov­ery plat­form around its unique math­em­at­ical mod­els of GPCR cell sig­nalling. The plat­form cov­ers tar­get char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion, hit iden­ti­fic­a­tion, hit-to-lead and lead optim­iz­a­tion stages. The plat­form com­bines state-of-the-art time-resolved bio­logy assays, high through­put com­pound screen­ing, com­pu­ta­tional sys­tems bio­logy, advanced molecu­lar dynam­ics, machine learn­ing / AI pipelines, and a full range of com­pu­ta­tional chem­istry and medi­cinal chem­istry approaches. This “mech­an­istic biology”-centred plat­form unlocks pre­vi­ously intract­able and high-risk-of-fail­ure tar­gets. It was val­id­ated in sev­eral industry col­lab­or­a­tions and is already yield­ing drug can­did­ates with novel modes of action in onco­logy and meta­bolic dis­ease areas. For example, the com­pany has iden­ti­fied import­ant cell sig­nalling prop­er­ties cor­rel­ated with side effects in orally avail­able dia­betes treat­ments and is ration­ally design­ing new gen­er­a­tion of drugs to replace inject­able treat­ments in a $50-bil­lion dol­lar market.

Given this company’s vital expert­ise in molecu­lar dynam­ics, math­em­at­ical mod­els of GPCR drug action and machine learn­ing / AI approaches for drug char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion and design, InterAx is highly motiv­ated by the Uni­S­ens tech­no­logy concept and its poten­tial to deliver bet­ter drugs faster.