Chronic autoimmune conditions constitute a vast disease burden world-wide. At Wield Therapeutics, we are developing therapeutics with two goals: 1. To develop effective, safe therapeutics to treat these diseases and 2. target them to the right patients. Our group leverages genetics at multiple stages of the drug development pipeline, starting from target identification to biomarker and patient selection in later clinical stages. We will first target large autoimmune conditions where current treatments are effective among only a subset of patients (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis).
Aim 1: Use the UKB to discover biomarkers which identify RA patients most likely to benefit from our treatment. We will correlate Olink-derived measurements of protein levels of members of our targeted pathway with other blood based measurements in patients with RA. We will further subdivide the population by their treatment history and compare these blood based measurements to protein levels of our pathway members. This will enable the development of a clinical grade assay which will additionally be an efficacy biomarker of our drug.
Aim 2: Stratify patients by polygenic risk scores weighted by Olink measurements. Another goal of our clinical trials will be to sequence the genomes of participants and predict response to our drug based on polygenic risk. We aim to augment the UKB polygenic risk scores for RA by producing an Olink weighted PRS. In subsequent clinical phases, we expect genetic risk will enable patient selection for a focused clinical trial.
Intent to disseminate our work: Our group aims to produce 2-3 publications. The first 1-2 publications will describe the clinical grade assay and how this assay enabled patient stratification in our First in Human Trial. The last publication we have planned will describe the use of biomarkers in our Phase 2 trial.
