First partnership announced under Verge Labs' platform-first model; Tenacia will apply Verge's AI platform and proprietary multimodal human tissue data to characterize targets across select CNS programs

Verge Labs and Tenacia Biotechnology  announced a strategic platform partnership to advance Tenacia's pipeline for central nervous system (CNS) diseases. Under the agreement, Verge will leverage its platform and proprietary multimodal human tissue data to prioritize and characterize targets for select Tenacia programs, grounding Tenacia's development decisions in human brain biology. The work pairs Verge's platform with Tenacia's internal development and disease expertise.

The collaboration is the first partnership Verge Labs has announced under the platform-first commercial model the company introduced in May. It is the first of several CNS engagements now underway, reflecting the growing demand for answers drawn directly from human data at the points in development where programs often fail.

Verge Labs is built on one of the largest proprietary multimodal CNS patient datasets of its kind: more than 12,000 brain transcriptomes across 6,500 patients, with matched single-cell, proteomic, genomic and clinical data. Drug developers use the platform to answer translational questions that determine a program's likelihood of success in the clinic – how a target behaves in human tissue, which preclinical models best predict human response, what a target's mechanism of action is, which biomarkers track its activity, and which patients are most likely to respond – grounding those decisions in direct human evidence before substantial resources are committed.

"Tenacia is building one of the most differentiated CNS pipelines in the field," said Alice Zhang, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Verge Labs. "They came to us to ground their target decisions in patient data. That can be the difference between a CNS program that works and one that fails, and it's exactly what we built the platform to do."

"Verge has assembled the human tissue data and AI models the CNS field has been missing," said Chen-bing Guan, VP of Translational Medicine at Tenacia Biotechnology. "Their platform complements Tenacia's internal development capabilities as we continue to compete on innovation and grow our CNS pipeline onto the global stage."

Work on the collaboration is now underway.