Researchers at Integrated Biosciences have developed a new platform that allows for millisecond and micron-level control of previous cumbersome biological systems, unlocking new therapeutic opportunities for age-related diseases.
The platform combines optogenetics, chemistry, and AI to discover small molecule treatments for age-related diseases.
New peer-reviewed publications demonstrate the function of the platform by applying it to Integrated Stress Responses (ISRs), a key aging and disease-related signaling pathway associated with neurodegeneration, cancer and viral infections.
Benefits of ISR to reduce the pathology of age-related diseases
Scientists have led to the discovery of several ISR spectacle compounds that use optogenetic controls to selectively activate ISRs, leading to the discovery of several ISR spectacle compounds that sensitize stress cells to apoptosis without inducing cytotoxicity across a variety of cell types and stressors.
The lead compounds identified in this study exhibited extensive antiviral activity in vitro, and one compound significantly reduced disease pathology and viral infection in a mouse model of herpesvirus age-related infection in the ocular.
A powerful new approach to drug discovery
The new platform allows for accurate and dynamic control of biological targets and processes, unlocking powerful new approaches to drug discovery.
The platform interrogates biological systems with millisecond temporal accuracy and micron-scale spatial resolution by integrating programmable, photoresponsive domains with automated high-throughput screens.
This unique modular system allows researchers to resolve complex effects in real time across diverse targets, cell types and age-related diseases, providing levels of accuracy and control that cannot be achieved with traditional screening techniques.
“We’ve seen a lot of people who have a lot of fun and healthy life,” said Maxwell Wilson, PhD, co-founder and chief science officer of Integrated Biological Sciences.
“Our platforms allow specific targets and paths to be activated with light, producing the discovery of high-precision compounds with clean, interpretable reads and often unprecedented mechanisms of action, which were previously inaccessible.”
Greater advantages over traditional screening tools
Unlike traditional perturbation agents and pharmacological tools, this platform allows for selective, pathway-specific activation with no off-target or systemic confounding effects, generating clean, high-fidelity pathway data sets.
This is particularly important in phenotypic screening and AI-driven discovery, with data quality remaining a major bottleneck for extracting meaningful insights.
It also provides generalizable strategies for discovering small molecules that regulate traditionally challenging targets and pathways, including age-related diseases.
The system is modular and tunable, allowing phenotypic accuracy on the pathway to rapidly adapt to explore a wide range of biological processes. This is a major advantage over traditional screening tools.
Wilson concluded:
“Synthetic biology provides the control needed to build a more accurate, disease-related discovery system. Our goal is to bring this level of accuracy to other pathways where traditional tools have failed.”
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