Accelerating Breakthroughs in EB (ABE) Working Toward Clinical Trial with Kiin Bio's Virtual Scientist Platform

Accelerating breakthroughs for patients living with rare disease

Accelerating Breakthroughs in EB (ABE) is a biopharmaceutical organisation dedicated to improving the lives of patients with Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa (DEB), a rare and devastating genetic skin disorder that causes chronic blistering, pain, and scarring.

Among the many complications of DEB, chronic itch (pruritus) stands out as one of the most burdensome and underappreciated symptoms. It results from a complex interplay between skin barrier disruption, nerve stimulation, and inflammatory signalling. Yet despite its impact on patients' quality of life, there are currently no FDA-approved therapies that directly target EB-associated itch.

Determined to change this, ABE set an ambitious goal: to initiate a clinical trial by early 2026 focused on evaluating new or existing therapies for treating EB-related itch.

To move quickly and effectively, the team needed to answer a set of complex questions:

• What are the key molecular mechanisms driving itch in EB?

• How do emerging drug classes such as JAK inhibitors fit within this biology?

• Which existing or combination therapies show the strongest mechanistic and clinical potential?

• Most importantly, how can all of this data be synthesised into a clear, evidence-based trial strategy?

Turning data overload into data-driven strategy

To meet this challenge, ABE partnered with Kiin Bio, leveraging the power of the Virtual Scientist Platform (KiinOS) to accelerate insight generation across multiple scientific domains.

Traditionally, evaluating more than 30 therapeutic assets for mechanism alignment, safety, and trial feasibility would take over a month of manual work. Each asset might require a full day of research, data wrangling, and validation.

With KiinOS, that process was completed in hours.

Through an automated scoring framework, the Virtual Scientists compared more than 30 therapeutic assets against DEB disease biology and itch-related pathways, identifying areas of synergy and overlap that could inform trial design. The system continuously updated as new data emerged, giving the ABE team a dynamic and evolving picture of the clinical landscape.

This iterative, data-driven approach replaced static literature reviews and manual searches with continuous learning, enabling faster, more confident decisions and a stronger clinical trial strategy.

Kiin Bio's Virtual Scientist Platform gave us rapid, data-driven insights that would have taken months to uncover manually, helping us design a stronger clinical trial strategy and stay on track to deliver meaningful therapies for patients with EB. The platform's ability to integrate complex datasets and provide actionable recommendations has been transformative for our research approach, enabling us to make more informed decisions faster than ever before.

Alex Hersham
CEO, ABE

Results: 90% faster insights, evidence-based design

Within just one week, the ABE and Kiin Bio teams achieved what would typically take over a month:

• 90% reduction in time-to-insight (~330 research hours saved)

• 30+ therapeutic assets analysed and ranked by mechanistic relevance and trial feasibility

• Clinical trial strategy finalised ahead of schedule, maintaining ABE's momentum toward a 2026 launch

Transforming the pace of discovery

Scientific discovery rarely follows a linear path. New findings can shift priorities, new therapies can emerge, and new questions often arise faster than answers.

KiinOS was designed to keep pace with this complexity, delivering not just information, but continuously updated, evidence-based insights that evolve alongside the science itself.

For ABE, that meant transforming an ambitious clinical objective into a clear, actionable strategy in record time and moving one step closer to improving outcomes for patients living with one of the world's most challenging rare diseases.