South San Francisco, Calif., and Watertown, Mass., May 21, 2026 — Calico Life Sciences LLC (Calico), a clinical-stage biotechnology organization focused on aging and age-related diseases and founded by Alphabet Inc. and Arthur D. Levinson, Ph.D., and Nexo Therapeutics Inc. (Nexo), today announced a multi-target collaboration to discover and develop small molecule therapeutics for challenging disease targets.
Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will jointly pursue targets nominated by Calico, leveraging Nexo’s expertise and proprietary platform to identify and optimize small molecule candidates. Calico will lead further development and commercialization of programs emerging from the collaboration.
“We are pleased to partner with Nexo to explore new approaches to targeting challenging disease biology,” said Jonathan W. Lewis, Ph.D., Chief Business Officer at Calico. “As Calico continues to advance its early pipeline and build new collaborations, we are focused on pairing our deep understanding of aging biology with partners who can help accelerate the translation of our insights into new therapeutics. Nexo’s integrated platform offers a compelling approach to defining pharmacology and enabling the discovery of novel small molecule therapies for historically undruggable or hard-to-drug targets.”
Nexo’s platform combines advanced chemistry and chemical biology to expand what can be targeted with small molecule therapies. Its CODON engine uses a proprietary covalent library and proteomics to identify and optimize compounds. These capabilities establish target profiles early in discovery, helping guide medicinal chemistry and accelerate development towards the clinic.
“For too many people, there are still no therapies that address the fundamental drivers of their disease,” said Rhamy Zeid, Chief Scientific Officer at Nexo. “To expand what is druggable, Nexo is working at the intersection of target biology and ligand discovery to pursue therapies against elusive targets. This collaboration allows us to pair those capabilities with Calico’s deep expertise in disease biology and advance small molecule candidates not accessible through traditional approaches.”
About Calico
Calico (Calico Life Sciences LLC) is an Alphabet-founded research and development company whose mission is to harness advanced technologies and model systems to increase our understanding of the biology that controls human aging. Calico will use that knowledge to devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives. To learn more about Calico, visit www.calicolabs.com. Follow @calico on LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.
About Nexo
Nexo Therapeutics Inc. is a small-molecule company dedicated to the discovery and development of new drugs for patients who currently lack meaningful therapies. Nexo combines covalent ligand discovery and chemical biology with expertise in biology and medicinal chemistry to target fundamental drivers of disease by innovative approaches. For more information, please visit www.nexotx.com.
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