Ochre Health Group Pty Ltd.

Jack O’Meara announced on LinkedIn Monday that he is stepping down from the CEO post at Ochre Bio, the liver disease startup he co-founded. In an interview with Endpoints News , he teased plans for a neurodegenerative disease startup, though he said work is still in its early phases. Ochre Bio has inked partnerships with both GSK and Boehringer Ingelheim in the past year. “It’s a big job. It takes its toll. And I felt after the two deals, we put the company in a really strong position for its next phase,” O’Meara said about his decision to leave Ochre now. “My skill set lends itself quite well to building early-stage companies and getting platforms off the ground,” he added. Eliot Forster will become executive chairman of Ochre Bio, steering the company as it finds a new CEO “in due course.” O’Meara said that he is working on a startup focused on Alzheimer’s, a disease that is personal to his family. His grandmother, who he was particularly close to, was diagnosed with the disease when he was growing up. “She suffered a lot from Alzheimer’s. It’s a tragic, terrible condition that you lose them so far before they actually go,” he said. “That was always something that left its mark on me.” He said that he had dabbled in starting an Alzheimer’s company before Ochre. Now, he says that investors have warmed up to the idea more. “In light of the recent approvals, [I’m] starting to see a little bit of hope for a company there. And those two approvals leave a lot of room to be desired for impactful new medicines,” he said. The FDA approved Eli Lilly’s Alzheimer’s treatment Kisunla earlier this year, and Biogen and Eisai’s Leqembi in 2023. O’Meara noted that he grew up in Athlone, Ireland — where Elan Corporation was founded. Elan was a major drug company that had tried and failed to develop an Alzheimer’s drug with Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer (via its acquisition of Wyeth). O’Meara said he’s just “beginning to piece together the puzzle” for this new startup.

GSK has entered into a multi-year data licence agreement with Ochre Bio to investigate the drivers of liver disease and accelerate the development of therapeutics, with the deal worth up to $37.5m. The partnership gives GSK access to Ochre’s computational biology, cellular and perfused human organ platforms to generate proprietary human liver data sets, as well as non-exclusive access to its library of historical liver data. The companies have not specified what indications they will target, but both will use the data to build artificial intelligence (AI) models that allow for more precise experiments to aid in target choice. Kim Branson, senior vice president, global head of AI and machine learning at GSK, said: “Ochre Bio’s platform will provide GSK with foundational data sets to create AI models, allowing us to better understand liver function and disease for the development of novel medicines.” The agreement has a total value of up to $37.5m for both co-exclusive and non-exclusive data licences. Jack O’Meara, Ochre’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said: “Data innovation is as important as algorithmic innovation when investing in machine learning workflows… These large-scale, causal human data sets will be foundational for our respective liver research and development pipelines.” Liver disease, including metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), primary biliary cholangitis and hepatitis B, results in more than 10,000 UK deaths every year. GSK’s investigational antisense oligonucleotide bepirovirsen was granted fast track designation from the US Food and Drug Administration in February as a treatment for chronic hepatitis B, which affects nearly 300 million people worldwide. “In addition to our programmes in MASH to hepatitis B, we are committed to addressing unmet needs in liver disease by generating unique data in human derived systems,” Branson said in the latest announcement. The deal comes just one week after GSK said that it had acquired US-based Elsie Biotechnologies and its oligonucleotide discovery platform for $50m. The company outlined that it will combine data generated from Elsie’s platform with its own AI and machine learning capabilities to support the development of predictive models for the design of oligonucleotides, which have the ability to modulate gene expression.

GSK’s interest in Ochre Bio lies in the company’s platform that allows livers to stay alive for a few days for the extraction of tissue samples. GSK and Ochre Bio will work together in a $37.5 million partnership to pinpoint the drivers of liver disease. The new partnership, announced Wednesday morning, will see GSK access Ochre’s computational biology, cellular and perfused human organ platforms to generate human liver data sets that can be used to better understand the biology of the liver. The goal, of course, is to eventually develop therapeutics to address liver diseases. The companies did not specify what indications they plan to target, however, GSK said the collaboration would complement its disease area focus in hepatology. The U.K. pharma has clinical assets in primary biliary cholangitis, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis, cholestatic pruritus and hepatitis B, the latter of which dominates a large portion of its early-stage pipeline. GSK is advancing bepirovirsen in a phase 3 trial for chronic hepatitis B as a functional cure for the infection. The pharma expects annual sales of 2 billion pounds sterling ($2.57 billion) for the med. Also in phase 3 from the liver portfolio is linerixibat for cholestatic pruritus in primary biliary cholangitis, a condition that causes intense itch that is not satisfied by scratching. “In addition to our programs in MASH to hepatitis B, we are committed to addressing unmet need in liver disease by generating unique data in human-derived systems. Ochre Bio’s platform will provide GSK with foundational data sets to create AI models allowing us to better understand liver function and disease for the development of novel medicines,” said Kim Branson, senior vice president and global head of AI and machine learning at GSK, in a Wednesday statement. GSK’s interest in Ochre lies in the biotech’s platform that allows livers to stay alive for a few days for the extraction of tissue samples. GSK’s in-house AI and machine learning experts will analyze the data from the partnership and use it to build better models and, thus, more precise experiments for developing new liver disease therapeutics. The $37.5 million deal will include both co-exclusive and nonexclusive data licenses, but full details were not released.