Prepaire Announces Partnership With Ncardia To Accelerate Plans To Discover New Drugs & Repurpose Existing Libraries

Ncardia to develop and manufacture Induced Pluripotent Stem-Cell based solutions (iPSC) for Prepaire.

Prepaire Labs, an Omics company, mining, mapping & navigating biology and chemistry to empower their autonomous drug discovery and production operating system (OS), and Ncardia, the leader in developing stem cell-based solutions for drug discovery and cell therapy, today announced the signing of a 5-year agreement. The potential outcome of this partnership accelerates every aspect of drug discovery and development, including target discovery, lead optimization, toxicity assessment, and trial design.

Prepaire enables precision medicine by integrating whole-genome sequencing with deep phenotyping to data visualize clinical IPS panels. Prepaire offers the development of specific IPSC lines, phenotypes, and organelles for in-vitro treatment validation and, thus, paving the way for personalized treatment.

The platform combines in-silico prediction with high throughput wet-lab validation in an iterative cycle that empowers continuous improvement and increases efficiency, accuracy, and reliability, which are critical to drug R&D. The new effort will launch efforts to design iPSCs by reprogramming adult cells (e.g., skin cells, blood cells) to an embryonic stem cell-like state, with the potential to become any cell type of the human body. Different cells are suited to different applications.

For more than a decade, Ncardia has been pioneering innovations in iPSC applications. Their iPSC-based drug discovery platforms have been successfully leveraged by large biopharma, up-and-coming drug discovery firms, and multinational research consortia to advance therapeutic candidates for cardiovascular, neurological, and other disease areas, enabling their clients to get to crucial decision points faster and with higher confidence Within this partnership, Ncardia will design and produce scalable in vitro iPSC-based screening models by reprogramming adult cells (e.g., skin cells, blood cells) to a pluripotent state, enabling the potential to become any cell type of the human body, develop the required assays and perform screenings.

Carl Freer, Founder & CEO of Prepaire commented “Our vision at Prepaire is to bring together the ability to generate biological and chemical data at unprecedented fidelity and scale, alongside the incredible capabilities of cutting-edge machine learning methods to extract insights from these data, towards the goal of deconvoluting disease biology and developing new therapeutics for patients,” he continued “To successfully achieve this, we partnered with Ncardia, to integrate them in the Prepaire OS. Enabling us to produce predictably differentiated, characterized, and functional cells for large-scale allogeneic iPSC treatments. They bring years of scientific, real-world process and production expertise and their addition to our eco-system will hugely enhance our capabilities as we head into a pivotal year at Prepaire. Our agreement with Ncardia allows us to use iPSC-based models with maximum relevance and predictability, at the scale needed for disease research to develop or repurpose the most effective drug for patients, regardless of modality. Given Ncardia’s expertise as a global leader in this field, they are the ideal partner to allow us to scale this new paradigm in medical science and healthcare at the pace we desire.”

Getting better therapies to patients faster is central to Ncardia’s mission, and partnering with a company like Prepaire that shares both that vision and the understanding of the ability of iPSC technologies to help achieve it, is compelling”, says Stefan Braam, Ncardia Founder, and CEO. “The combination of advanced, intelligent machine learning tools with relevant human biology models offers a better future for drug development and we’re excited to be a part of that with our work with Prepaire.”