Summary
Kristen Fortney discusses the Bioage platform and one of their most promising drugs. Bioage focuses on translating and analyzing human-derived molecular data to discover drug candidates that have already have clinical data and partial approval. Doing so allows them to rapidly bring drugs to market and focus on drugs which have the highest chance of affecting aging in humans.
The Bioage platform has 1.5 million clinical data points and 64 million molecular data points, leading to roughly 20 pathways assessed each year. Out of their data funnel, three clinical stage assets have emerged. Their most promising candidate is BGE-175.
BGE-175 is a drug which has partial approval (up to phase 3) and helps prevent immunosenescence. This drug could help slow aging while also protecting people against COVID and other related viruses.
Presenters
Kristen Fortney, Bioage
Kristen leads BIOAGE in its mission to develop a broad pipeline of therapies that target aging in order to increase healthspan and address chronic diseases. Kristen draws from a deep background in aging research and systems biology to develop BIOAGE’s data-driven approach to identify and target the molecular pathways that drive aging…
Presentation: Building a pipeline of clinical-stage therapies to target aging
- Bioage is building a pipeline of clinical-stage therapies that target the molecular causes of aging. They are focusing on human data and gather human molecular data from biobanks.
- Aging results from physical deterioration. It’s not just about death – as the body ages, it gets weaker over time resulting in many pathologies. There can be single interventions that directly target aging and help us live longer and free from multiple diseases.
- The easiest targets are the highest priority. Easy targets are ones where the pathway is well understood and it’s derisked by having a drug that already has phase 1 study data. They have raised ~$130 million so far.
- How to approach clinical development? In the near term, they commit to the mechanisms where there is an acute disease with a clear regulatory path with the FDA. Statins are a good example – they were first approved for an orphan disease then their label was widened over time.
- Lifespan has increased, but there is still a large lifespan/healthspan gap.
- There are examples of healthy longevity among us, certain centenarians continue to have good health for much longer than average.
- A brief history of aging progress. Activity kicked off with the discovery that a single gene could significantly alter c. elegans lifespan. As we move toward longer lived model organisms, it becomes harder to do research and perform lifespan studies. There are also problems with trying to translate breakthroughs from model organisms to humans.
- A distribution of age of death.
- An outline of a human-first, data-first platform. Source data from humans, characterize the data, map and validate the data, then build an intervention.
- Apelin case study as it applies to the Bioage data vetting process.
- Bioage currently has three platform-derived therapies.
- BGE-175 is an inhibitor of prostaglandin signaling, slowing immunosenescence. The drug has already been given to 2000+ patients in phase 3 studies for seasonal allergens. It was abandoned due to inefficiency at dealing with allergies, but looks like it could be used for aging.
- It’s possible to use this drug to improve the immune system for the elderly in response to things like COVID and SARS.
Mouse data from disease studies using BGE-175.
Bioage is currently doing phase 2 clinical trials for this drug.
- It is believed this drug can help protect against many different diseases.
