Xylyx Bio announces development of disease-specific cell culture products to accelerate anti-fibrotic drug discovery and screening

Xylyx Bio announced the development of substrates for anti-fibrotic drug discovery as the next stage of its pipeline of pre-clinical cell culture products.

Through the development of fibrosis-specific in-vitro substrates, Xylyx Bio aims to support drug discovery and development for fibrotic diseases such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Xylyx Bio is actively partnering with leading pharmaceutical companies to support deeper understanding of fibrosis biology and develop fibrosis-specific platforms for high-throughput screening and has signed an agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim, which is actively researching this area.

Fibrotic disorders contribute to an estimated 45% of all-cause mortality in the USA, and effective therapies are limited due to the high failure rate of drug candidates in clinical trials. Although predictive in-vitro models of fibrotic disease for pharmaceutical drug development hold potential to reduce attrition and accelerate approval of effective drugs, conventional cell-based models are not reflective of human disease. This persistent gap represents a major challenge to successfully developing lifesaving drugs. The availability of more physiologic cell models holds great potential to significantly improve in-vitro models and help accelerate the development of new therapeutics.

“Current in-vitro models poorly mimic fibrosis biology, and thus are of limited value in anti-fibrotic drug development,” explained John O’Neill, Chief Scientific Officer of Xylyx Bio. “Our fibrosis-specific extracellular matrix products benefit drug discovery programs by enabling drug candidates to be investigated in a disease-relevant in-vitro environment that recapitulates human fibrosis, yielding new insights into fibrotic mechanisms and guiding decision-making through therapeutic development.”