Axial Discovery - Kidney disease
Call for talented individuals and teams
Axial: https://linktr.ee/axialxyz
Axial partners with great founders and inventors. We invest in early-stage life sciences companies such as Appia Bio, Seranova Bio, Delix Therapeutics, Simcha Therapeutics, among others often when they are no more than an idea. We are fanatical about helping the rare inventor who is compelled to build their own enduring business. If you or someone you know has a great idea or company in life sciences, Axial would be excited to get to know you and possibly invest in your vision and company . We are excited to be in business with you - email us at info@axialvc.com
Kidney disease
Kidney disease affects over 30M people in the US and accounts for over $100M in annual healthcare costs. Without effective treatments, patients have to undergo procedures like dialysis and transplantation that lower a patient’s quality of life and lead to high healthcare costs. Excitedly, new tools combined with genomics has led to an improving understanding of kidney biology. Combined with new surrogate endpoints, drug development in kidney disease is set up to transform patient lives.
Companies like Goldfinch Bio, Chinook Therapeutics, Purespring Therapeutics, and Walden Biosciences are bringing new tools to develop medicines particularly for rare kidney diseases with defined clinical development milestones:
Genomics: several GWAS studies have been done to discover new genetic variants driving kidney diseases - targets, pathways, and MoAs - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22143329/
Proteomics: kidney-generated proteins are useful signals of how the disease has progressed. For example, the CKD273 classifier, based on 273 urinary peptides, has been shown to be useful to detect chronic kidney disease (CKD) early - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23690958/
Metabolomics: this is the toolkit that is theoretically most tractable given that there are ~10^3 metabolites versus ~10^4 genes and ~10^6 proteins. A few metabolites that are indicative of certain kidney diseases are γ-butyrobetaine, citrulline, and kynurenine - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23052862/
Within kidney disease, the big opportunity is CKD. Current treatments only delay the onset of end-stage renal failure and have some really bad side effects. Around 20M in the US have CKD with 500K of them having end-stage versions, which requires dialysis or a transplant. For CKD, new MoAs to pursue are (inhibiting the renin–angiotensin–aldosterone pathway has been the traditional approach centered around blood pressure): loss of podocytes and renal epithelial cells, chemokines, JAK inhibitors, and ECM deposition. Who is building omics platform businesses to cure kidney disease?
