Though there has been several innovations in the healthcare space, the quality of healthcare is not up to the expectations even today. However, there are various solution providers who are trying to create a difference in the industry. One such provider is Goldfinch Bio—a precision medicine kidney company focused on its mission of delivering disease-modifying precision medicines that bring hope and renewed quality of life to people with kidney disease. The company aspire to save kidneys and end dialysis.

Despite the widespread prevalence of Chronic Kidney Disease, there is no cure and there are no effective treatments for most forms of Chronic Kidney Disease. As a result, physicians are left to prescribe off-label therapies, which often lead patients to experience side effects that are more severe than the disease itself. Because of the lack of disease-modifying treatments in kidney disease, patients typically continue to progress to end-stage kidney disease, leading to dialysis and/or transplantation. Goldfinch is driven to find an alternative to dialysis or transplantation with its product candidates. “We are applying precision medicine to pioneer the discovery, development and commercialization of disease modifying kidney disease treatments. Our initial clinical programs are focused on the significant unmet need associated with rare biomarker-driven subsets of focal segmental glomerulosclerosis and diabetic nephropathy.”

With a sole focus on kidney diseases, Goldfinch Bio aspire to be the world’s leading kidney precision medicine company. Patients often have limited therapeutic options that target the underlying cause of disease. The company’s solution to address this growing need is applying precision medicine to pioneer the discovery, development and commercialization of kidney disease treatments. The goal of precision medicine is not only to advance more effective and targeted medicines, but also to reduce the potential for harm and reduce healthcare costs arising from unnecessary treatments.

Current treatments, including off-label therapies, address the symptoms of kidney disease but result in severe side effects; they are not designed to treat the root cause of disease. Many people living with kidney disease follow the same trajectory, ultimately progressing from onset to end-stage kidney disease where they ultimately endure a challenging treatment regimen that involves a combination of dialysis and transplantation, significantly impacting their and their family’s quality of life. There are no treatments that can protect those affected by kidney disease – and their kidneys – from following this path. Thanks to a growing understanding of kidney biology and genetics, including pioneering research by the founders of Goldfinch, the scientific community is starting to understand the heterogeneity inherent in kidney diseases. There are molecular and environmental causes that are associated with biological targets – and the company can identify subsets of those affected by these biological targets.

The foundation of Goldfinch’s approach is its product engine through which they are interrogating drivers of disease and advancing precision medicines that specifically target those drivers. “Our product engine allows us to identify, validate and drug novel targets aimed at treating subsets of patients within a heterogeneous kidney disease, based on common characteristics.”

In addition, the company’s KGA is a proprietary computational platform built in-house to identify genetic and environmental causes of kidney diseases in patient subsets and the associated biological targets for therapeutic intervention. The KGA platform houses genomic, transcriptomic and clinical data from tens of thousands of people living with kidney disease. These data are mined using proprietary algorithms and other methods to identify molecular and environmental causes of kidney diseases.  Currently, the KGA platform consists of data from over 20,000 patients and population-based controls, and we continue to expand the data in the KGA into other kidney diseases.

To build its KGA platform, the company have been establishing a large network of academic and commercial suppliers of clinical samples and phenotypic data from people with kidney disease.  Using a third-party vendor, the team then sequence these samples to generate the genomic and transcriptomic data.  These data are then aggregated on a disease basis and analyzed in the KGA platform.  This supportive infrastructure of sourcing and sequencing patient samples can be leveraged as the company continue to expand the KGA platform into other kidney diseases. “We integrate novel tools and approaches with a strong team of industry experts in prosecuting a range of cytosolic and membrane bound targets including ion channels, GPCRs and kinases. We seek to improve the efficiency of drug discovery and time to clinical trials by integrating biology, lead discovery and chemistry during the later stages of target validation to accelerate hit finding. We then apply ligand and structure-based drug discovery approaches to establish structure activity relationships and to integrate multiparametric data which leads to novel insights and design hypotheses.”