Axiom Biotechnologies, Inc.

Axiom is a biotechnology company focused on the rapid development of more effective and safer drugs through the innovative use of human cells in drug discovery. Axiom is the first company to possess the technology and supporting assets to rapidly assay large numbers of compounds against broad selections of non-engineered human cells. This capability enables Axiom to comprehensively integrate cell-based assays into every step of the drug discovery process. Axiom has used its cell-based assay resources to build innovative physiomic and physiogenomic drug discovery platforms and is further expanding and leveraging these resources to create other revolutionary enhancements to drug discovery.

Axiom's physiogenomics platform includes the Axiom Human Cell Bank as a source of all expressed genes and a suite of methodologies for establishing gene function. This platform improves genomics-based drug discovery in two major ways. First, it dramatically accelerates the process of target validation and assay development, two of the most time-consuming and therefore costly phases of drug discovery. The size and diversity of the Human Cell Bank ensure that one or more cell lines express each gene of interest, allowing Axiom scientists to validate drug discovery targets fast. These cell lines are then used to rapidly establish a physiologically relevant assay for gene function suitable for drug discovery. Second, the use of human cells for drug screening allows immediate access to more complex targets, such as multiple-protein signaling pathways or cellular processes that are not well characterized biochemically. Such complex interactions are difficult to reconstruct in either cell-free systems or those employing transfected or otherwise altered cells typically used in drug discovery. The non-engineered cells in the Axiom Human Cell Bank, however, retain all of these interactions in their physiological form and approximate ideal drug discovery systems.

Axiom's physiomics platform is built on Axiom's high-throughput technology for measuring pharmacological profiles of drug candidates (RHACE), and their potential side-effect liabilities and cytotoxicity (SAPHE). Since human cell lines are very good models of the tissues from which they are derived, the highly representative Human Cell Bank can be used to predict the physiological effects of compounds, such as efficacy, side effects and toxicity, on all of the important tissues of the body. Furthermore, because Axiom's RHACE technology is able to screen large numbers of compounds against the Axiom Cell Bank, all active compounds from a drug discovery program, from the earliest hits onward, can be profiled for their physiological activities. Such comprehensive longitudinal analysis of important drug characteristics dramatically reduces the chances of failure during late stage pre-clinical development or in clinical trials and ensures the production of safer and more effective drugs.

Although the advantages of using non-engineered human cells may seem obvious, only with Axiom's Human Cell Bank and RHACE cell assay technologies does their broad use in all phases of drug discovery become feasible. For example, when profiling hits for efficacy and specificity, an important rate-limiting step in drug discovery, one skilled person can perform a detailed analysis of 5 compounds against 10 cell lines in a week using conventional technologies. This estimate assumes that the person already has the characterized cell lines ready for use. When one contemplates profiling the thousands of compounds generated by a single drug discovery program against the hundreds of cell lines necessary to represent all of the important tissues of the human body, the resource requirements become prohibitive. Furthermore, the time and resources necessary to assemble and characterize a human cell bank as well as to develop assay technologies for non-engineered human cells provide a significant barrier to pursing human cell-based drug discovery. Axiom has invested six years of effort and several million dollars to develop technologies which will significantly shorten the drug discovery process and at the same time ensure the production of safer and more effective drugs.