Nurosene, Cyclica partner for neurodegenerative disease drug development

As part of the collaboration, the companies will use Nurosene’s core AI tools, NetraHealthAtlas, to speed up the drug discovery process.

NetraHealthAtlas is designed to produce insights regarding the patient populations as well as different aspects of disease.

It creates hypotheses of invisible causal factors from patient sub-populations accurately and recommends the process for targeting a disease by exploring the required biochemistry.

Nurosene chief scientific officer Dr Joseph Geraci said: “Observing the Netra Health Atlas create accurate hypotheses in less than an hour, about diseases that have taken years for pharmaceutical companies to discover, is very exciting. We have now reached a point where our AI is teaching us how to approach curing disease.

“The drugs that can be developed from this partnership have the potential to change the way we treat neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, profoundly impacting millions of patients and their families around the world.”

For the discovery of new drug candidates, Cyclica will utilise its AI-augmented drug discovery platform for drug targets which are discovered by NetraHealthAtlas.

The partnership also includes the use of Nurosene’s technology for generating protein targets from patient level genetic data of different types.

This will allow polypharmacology-enabled platform of Cyclica to predict molecular candidates for the selected protein targets which can be tested for disease altering properties.

Additionally, the collaboration deal includes a commercialising party milestone payment as well as royalty payments that will be made following the license deals.

The license agreements will be signed by the companies after developing the drug compounds.