Around 165 million Europeans suffer from brain disorders. Treatment costs the EU over €800 billion annually. Given this large market potential, pharmaceutical companies spend more than €1 billion a year in preclinical drug development for brain disorders. Yet, no real breakthrough treatments have emerged in the last decades. The complexity and individuality of brain disorders prevent success with the conventional ‘ONE disease – ONE target – ONE drug’ paradigm.
Instead, concepts of precision medicine using human model systems, repurposing screenings, and validation in relevant animal models are essential to disrupt the stalled discovery of drugs for brain disorders. Systasy’s is combining modular molecular barcoding technologies and human disease models to decode the complexity of pathological processes and mode-of-actions of approved drugs in a single experiment.
Systasy’s vision is to deliver precision-medicine innovations that advance drug discovery for severe brain disorders. Integrating our multi-target technologies into an end-to-end solution for early drug discovery studies. To that end, we will present showcases of our precision discovery platform. First, comprehensive barcoded repurposing screenings allowed us to identify neuronal plasticity modulators and validate lead candidates in a AHDS model. Second, we will show data on the identification of a repurposed drug combination that holds promise to enhance cognition in schizophrenia. Third, in a collaboration with academic partners we have generated a huge cellular biobank with iPSC lines and neuronal derivatives from hundreds of patients suffering from mental disorders and identified a converging mechanism for schizophrenia that will allow personalized repurposing compound screenings in the future.