Ixico joins Huntington's disease research consortium

Neuroimaging contract research provider Ixico has entered a multi-party consortium for the early detection of Huntington's disease (HD), it announced on Tuesday.

The AIM-traded firm described HD as a rare, inherited disease that causes the progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain, affecting movement, mood and thinking abilities.

It said the consortium would develop new standards for HD image analysis on existing datasets.

Ixico would deliver the analysis to the biopharma and charitable foundation consortia members using its proprietary, deep learning-based ‘IXIQ.Ai’ analysis platform.

The contract was worth around £0.9m in revenue, which was expected to be delivered within 2022.

Ixico said the output of the project would enable current and future consortium partners to develop improved approaches to stratifying patients in HD clinical trials, as well as increasing the precision of efficacy measurements of drugs within HD clinical trials.

The company said it would seek additional partners to join the consortium in due course.

“There are no existing approved disease modifying therapies for HD, nor interventions that slow disease progression,” said chief executive officer Giulio Cerroni.

“Consequently, we are very excited to initiate this consortium and look forward to working closely with our founding partners in the development of novel imaging tools that enable the design of more efficient HD clinical trials.”

Cerroni said applying “the latest” image analysis and artificial intelligence techniques to a large dataset of HD natural history data would enable new insights and standards aimed towards implementing precision medicine approaches in HD trials.

“This consortium agreement further cements Ixico’s position as the leading analysis company for HD as part of its wider portfolio of leading analytical tools to support clinical trials into neurological diseases.”

At 1125 BST, shares in Ixico were up 3.04% at 39.67p.

Reporting by Josh White at Sharecast.com.