Biotechnology companies Valinor Discovery and Renew Biotechnologies have announced a strategic collaboration to generate what they say will be the largest clinical multi-omics dataset for neurological disorders. 

Designed to improve the prediction of disease onset and therapeutic responses, the initiative aims to provide Valinor access to multimodal datasets derived from thousands of patients spanning Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and other neurological disorders to support large foundation model development. 

The collaboration will combine Valinor’s capabilities in machine learning with Renew’s quality controlled, clinical laboratory infrastructure, which can generate high-resolution multi-omics data from well-characterised patient samples. 

Despite advances in technology, neurological drug development remains challenging due to the biological complexity of the central nervous system and the limited availability of clinically relevant human data. 

Under the collaboration, Renew will source clinical samples and apply its native-read sequencing workflows within a quality-controlled translational environment to generate genomic and epigenomic data for downstream modelling. Valinor will deploy its proprietary machine learning architectures to identify disease-relevant patterns and predictive signatures of therapeutic response from the longitudinal, multimodal data. 

“Predictive models are crucially dependent, not only on the experience of the machine learning team, but also on the quality and relevance of the underlying training data,” said Joshua Pacini, Co-Founder and CEO of Valinor.  

“Renew delivers a rare combination of neurological domain expertise and access to high-quality, longitudinal molecular and clinical data that are relevant to drug development. Paired with our machine learning expertise, this collaboration will offer biopharma teams a stronger foundation to design clinical research programmes with a higher likelihood of success.” 

 “Neurology programmes often slow or fail when the underlying disease biology is not fully understood,” added Chad Pollard, Co-founder & CEO of Renew Biotechnologies. 

“Our role is to define and de-risk disease-specific biological signals early, so downstream modelling and development decisions are built on validated biology.”