Synfini Inc., involved in AI-driven drug discovery, and O2nix Bio, a biotech company advancing prooxidant therapies, announced a strategic collaboration to co-discover and develop novel drug candidates targeting FTSJ1, a tRNA-modifying enzyme implicated in metastatic cancer cell survival. This is O2nix Bio’s first collaboration as an independent, privately funded commercial entity, building on its extensive research into biochemical mechanisms that regulate metastasis.
The collaboration will combine O2nix Bio’s proprietary biology platform and scientific leadership in tRNA methylation with Synfini’s AI Cloud Foundry, an end-to-end automated system that accelerates the design-make-test-analyze (DMTA) drug discovery cycle.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with the Synfini team,” said Elena Piskounova, Ph.D., founder and CEO of O2nix Bio. “Their chemistry automation platform, paired with our mechanistic insights into RNA modifications, will allow us to advance first-in-class therapies targeting cancer metastasis—which is responsible for over 90% of cancer-related deaths and still largely untreatable by current therapies.”
Founded by Dr. Elena Piskounova, a renowned cancer biologist and principal investigator at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, O2nix Bio is advancing a pipeline of prooxidant targets based on years of foundational research in tRNA biology and cancer metastasis. Dr. Piskounova’s landmark studies most recently published in Nature Cancer have illuminated how RNA-modifying enzymes like FTSJ1 regulate cancer cell adaptation under oxidative stress, enabling the survival of metastatic cells in hostile environments. This collaboration marks the company’s first commercial drug discovery initiative aimed at translating these insights into targeted therapeutics.
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