CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Celsius Therapeutics, a company focused on bringing precision medicine to patients with autoimmunity, cancer and other complex diseases, today announced the signing of three collaboration agreements with the University of Oxford (Oxford, UK), Cleveland Clinic (Cleveland, U.S.) and the LMU University Hospital Munich (Munich, Germany). In each agreement, Celsius will partner with leading academic scientists to access patient tissue samples and apply its proprietary single-cell genomics platform and machine learning capabilities to discover new insights into inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Under these collaborations, Celsius will evaluate a large number of longitudinal (both pre- and post-treatment) samples, including biopsies from patients who respond to or fail anti-TNFα therapy (University of Oxford); Crohn’s disease patients who develop disease recurrence following intestinal resection (Cleveland Clinic); and children with very early onset IBD (LMU University Hospital Munich). Celsius will integrate single-cell RNA sequencing data from these samples with clinical data provided by its partners to identify novel drug targets and patient stratification approaches for specific patient subsets.

“Along with our previously announced collaboration with Janssen, our new academic collaborations enable Celsius to interrogate inflammatory bowel disease at the single-cell level across a number of clinical settings,” said Tariq Kassum, M.D., chief executive officer of Celsius. “IBD is heterogeneous, and we believe that connecting the insights gained across these different settings will lead to a new understanding of disease and facilitate the discovery of new drug targets for specific patient subsets. We are grateful to have academic partners that are fully aligned with our mission to provide new precision medicines for patients.”

Under the terms of each agreement, Celsius retains the ability to incorporate both the de-identified clinical information and longitudinal single-cell genomics data generated from these studies into its large and continuously growing database. Celsius plans to combine the knowledge generated by these agreements with other work using its single-cell genomics and machine learning algorithms to elucidate this complicated disease biology. Further, Celsius will combine these insights with orthogonal data sets derived from functional genomics and other approaches to verify biological mechanisms and validate potential drug targets.

“Each of our collaboration agreements has a specific study design to enhance our mechanistic understanding of IBD within defined patient contexts,” said Jeanne Magram, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Celsius. “Analyzing the rich single-cell data generated from more than 600 samples that will be collected across these collaborations will enable the creation of a unique database with depth and breadth previously unrealized in the field. Our platform is engineered to work at this scale, including the ability to integrate learnings across multiple clinical trials and different subsets of patients.”

About Celsius Therapeutics

Celsius Therapeutics is charting a new course of target and drug discovery by applying a systematic approach to single-cell sequencing of patient tissue, combining massive datasets, complex algorithms, and machine learning to discover first-in-class precision therapies with a transformative impact on the lives of patients with autoimmune diseases and cancer. Celsius was launched in 2018 and is based in Cambridge, Mass. For more information, please visit www.celsiustx.com.

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