Celsius Therapeutics Signs Collaboration Agreement with Janssen to Identify Response Biomarkers for Ulcerative Colitis

Celsius Therapeutics, a company focused on the discovery and development of precision therapeutics for patients with autoimmune diseases and cancer, announced a collaboration with Janssen Biotech, Inc. Under the terms of the agreement, Celsius will apply its proprietary single-cell genomics and machine learning platform to identify predictive biomarkers of response from Janssen’s VEGA study, a Phase 2a clinical trial evaluating the efficacy and safety of combination therapy with guselkumab and golimumab in patients with ulcerative colitis.

“We are very pleased to be collaborating with Janssen, a company with a long-standing commitment to improving the lives of patients with inflammatory bowel disease,” said Tariq Kassum, M.D., chief executive officer of Celsius. “As our first industry partnership, it serves as a model for how we can apply our integrated platform to identify the specific patients who will benefit from existing and investigational therapies, while simultaneously gathering data that will fuel Celsius’ novel target and drug discovery engine.”

Celsius will receive undisclosed payments along with potential milestones based on the use of biomarkers identified in the collaboration. Celsius retains the ability to integrate the clinical and sample-level data generated from the study into its growing database of patient and single-cell genomic information, and will further interrogate the data for its own target and drug discovery efforts.

“Celsius has built an industrialized platform at the scale necessary to consistently process intact patient samples and to rapidly integrate and interrogate the large datasets being generated across this global multicenter study,” said Christoph Lengauer, Ph.D., co-founder and chief scientific officer of Celsius. “The longitudinal patient datasets and sample-level information generated through this large study will enable Celsius and Janssen to extract deep molecular and cellular insights, which we hope will ultimately lead to better treatments for patients.”