Avicenna Biosciences, Inc.

Avicenna is proud to share that the USPTO has issued our first patent! This is an important step as we accelerate into the last mile of drug discovery, and advance our pipeline of novel medicines for hard-to-treat diseases. Read more in our press release: https://lnkd.in/e9CHQZvA.

Introducing AVI-009: A Promising New Drug We’re Developing to Reduce Movement Side Effects of Parkinson’s Disease After Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second-most common neurodegenerative disorder in the United States, with nearly 90,000 people diagnosed each year. Levodopa  is a drug regularly used to treat PD by replacing dopamine, a natural substance in the brain that helps control movement.  However, a common side effect is Levodopa-induced dyskinesia (LID), which involves involuntary, erratic movements of patients’ faces, arms, legs and/or trunks.  In fact, 50% of PD patients will develop LID after four to five years of  treatment with levodopa.  The negative impact of LID on PD patients’ lives is significant, but even so, the majority of patients prefer to continue levodopa treatment, because the drug works to manage their Parkinsonian symptoms. This is why at Avicenna, we’re developing a new small molecule drug that can be used in combination with levodopa to ensure the drug remains effective at treating PD while also eliminating involuntary movement side effects. Today, we are thrilled to share promising data on this new drug, currently named AVI-009.  Our animal study shows that AVI-009 has strong anti-dyskinetic properties: when AVI-009 was administered alongside levodopa, movement side effects were significantly reduced.  Also, while the effect of AVI-009 was present on day one of our animal study, it increased by day five, where it had a highly significant effect on abnormal involuntary movements.  Further, the effect of AVI-009 was greater at higher doses, demonstrating a dose-response relationship. These data, along with some of our previous IND-enabling work, show that AVI-009 is potent, highly selective, and well-tolerated, which should allow us to initiate the studies required to begin human trials of AVI-009.  We hope to launch a Phase 1 clinical trial of AVI-009 in late 2025 and are excited to keep you all posted on our progress! 

Avicenna Biosciences, Inc. is excited to announce a collaboration with Molecure. We look forward to accelerating the last mile of discovery of novel therapeutics targeting USP7. https://lnkd.in/gkGdChjj

We are proud to be a part of such an important effort!

Meet with us at #BIO2024!

You may have noticed a new look to Avicenna. Ahead of our company launch, we partnered with SINK to create a new company brand to reflect the innovative spirit of our technology. We’re delighted with the outcome and look forward to sharing more about the company’s progress on the website and here on LinkedIn. We welcome you to follow along. https://lnkd.in/eDRvSXKy

We recently published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling our latest study, a collaborative effort by researchers from Avicenna Biosciences, Schrödinger, and Microsoft Research AI4Science. Entitled “FEP-Augmentation as a Means to Solve Data Paucity Problems for Machine Learning in Chemical Biology,” we illustrate the use of physics-based techniques to generate virtual datasets, which overcome the challenges of data scarcity in small training sets and allow for the effective application of machine learning. Lead Optimization is one of the most crucial phases of drug design, and the effectiveness of dataset augmentation will make this “last mile” of drug discovery substantially faster and more cost-effective.   A big thank you to our esteemed collaborators and to the American Chemical Society and Kennie M. for supporting the paper. https://lnkd.in/efaHmAr3

Don't miss this fantastic Emerging Company Profile by BioCentury Inc.! https://lnkd.in/ezJXM3mb

Today is a BIG day for Avicenna! While we’ve been working hard since 2020, we’re now officially launching externally and sharing three major milestones:   1. An extension to our machine learning-enhanced medicinal chemistry platform, which accelerates the last mile of small molecule drug discovery. Using our novel technology, we’ve already discovered the first orally available, CNS-penetrant ROCK inhibitor for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, with IND-enabling studies initiated just over one year since our therapeutic program kicked off. 2. The publication of research in the peer-reviewed Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. Co-authored with researchers from Schrödinger and Microsoft Research AI4Science, the paper outlines how to use physics-based methods such as Free Energy Perturbation (FEP) to generate virtual data, which can be used to augment sparse data sets and allow for the effective application of machine learning. By combining FEP with machine learning in Lead Optimization – one of the most crucial phases of drug design – we demonstrate that profound implications can be realized, including faster timelines, cheaper costs and better therapeutics. 3. $14.5 million in venture funding raised to date, with DCVC Bio having led our 2022 seed round.   You can read more about these milestones today in BioCentury Inc., as well as our press release below. Kudos to the entire Avicenna team of employees, investors, collaborators and advisors for driving such exciting, rapid momentum toward accelerating drug discovery’s “last mile”. Onward! https://lnkd.in/g_7TG3Rg