Healx Expands Rare Oncology Pipeline Through AI-centered Deal with Vuja De Sciences
Healx, a drug discovery company founded by Tim Guilliams, a Cambridge-trained tech entrepreneur, and David Brown, the co-inventor of Viagra, has entered into a strategic collaboration with Vuja De Sciences to integrate Vuja’s cancer expertise with their Healx’s platform. This deal expands Healx’s clinical-stage rare oncology portfolio and incorporates Vuja De Sciences into its operational structure.
Leadership changes are also included in the agreement. David Warshawsky, founder and CEO of Vuja De Sciences, will continue to lead the osteosarcoma program while taking on a new role at Healx as Global Head of Metastatic Prevention.
Healx builds its work around a generative AI platform designed to spot new therapeutic opportunities in rare diseases. Healnet, the company’s drug discovery approach, brings together data from biomedical research, scientific publications, patient insights, and own curated sources to create a rare disease knowledge graph.
Advanced AI models are then applied to this graph to surface novel disease–compound relationships with the greatest likelihood of success. Healx complements the platform with human expertise in drug discovery to explore different ways of acting on these findings—whether by repurposing existing drugs, combining compounds, or optimizing molecules to boost their efficacy.
The centerpiece of the deal is HLX-4310, a therapy targeting metastatic osteosarcoma. Recurrence in this cancer type is particularly difficult to address, with five-year survival rates dropping below 20% once relapse occurs. The FDA has already cleared the Investigational New Drug (IND) application for HLX-4310, positioning the program to enter a Phase 1/2 clinical trial in collaboration with the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation’s Sunshine Project, a research consortium involving more than thirty hospitals.
We track collaborations like this weekly in Where Tech Meets Bio—our newsletter on startups, platforms, and deals at the intersection of biotech and digital.
Topic: Industry Movers
