Aizen Therapeutics, an AI-native biotechnology company focused on building oral biologics, announced a multi-program collaboration with a San Diego-based, public biotech to design oral peptide therapeutics using its DaX™ foundation model. The agreement provides Aizen with several million dollars in initial revenue and up to $100 million in milestones for each nominated target.

"Oral biologics represent a new frontier in drug development. We are focused on designing oral peptides for validated biological targets that can deliver an improved therapeutic index, reduced systemic toxicity, and enhanced target engagement in a pill," said Ajay Kshatriya, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Aizen Therapeutics. "We are excited to collaborate with a world-class partner to develop proof of activity with our DaX platform for well-known disease-relevant targets in immunology and neurology indications."

Aizen was spun out from Caltech, with a first-in-class computational design model for peptides. The DaX platform has been trained on millions of uniquely annotated molecules and receptors and explores the non-canonical amino acid (ncAA) peptide chemical space at ten times the scale of traditional ncAA discovery methods.

"With technical challenges in data scarcity and chemical complexity, de novo peptide design is the frontier of Drug Discovery AI," said David Van Valen, MD, PhD, Aizen Scientific Founder and Caltech Professor. "This collaboration represents a meaningful step for the field, pairing AI peptide design with a world-class biopharma category leader to advance molecules into medicines."