Home > Research > Drugs for Ageing
Drugs for Ageing
Identification of Secondary Targets and Design of New Drugs for Age-Associated Diseases by Means of Structural and Functional Analysis of Biological Pathways.
A project subsidized by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Subprograma de Proyectos Singulares Estratégicos, PSE, del Programa Nacional de Cooperación Público-Privada)
The project is led by Infociencia, an SME specializing in technology services and support for health research. Anaxomics Biotech contributes to the project providing our expertises in technology development. Moreover, scientific excellence is ensured through the participation of two research centres contributing expertises in computational and experimental interactomics, and structural biology - Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas and Institut de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona, from Spain - and two universities bringing in expertise in computational biology and microbiology - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, from Spain.
PROJECT SUMMARY
The main project objective is the design and implementation of a strategy to identify proteins that could be used as drug targets along with the design of functional inhibitors for the new targets identified. The strategy will be implemented on two pathologies associated with aging: Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.
The strategy implemented will be based on building a protein network for each of the target pathologies. Beyond of the typical networks of Systems Biology, the method implies to create mathematical models by means of artificial intelligence approaches. These mathematical models are trained to reproduce known effects in human health; for instance the positive effect of drugs, their adverse events, health states depending of the patterns of expression of proteins in patients, or simply clinical data.
One of the main advantages of applying this type of methodology is that it allows the identification of previously unknown protein targets, therefore most likely not used previously by any pharmaceutical company.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Up to date, the initial objectives of the project, including some new goals, have been fulfilled:
Diabetes, Parkinson and Alzheimer disease maps have been obtained.- Potential therapeutic targets for Alzheimer's disease have been identified.
- 12 great significance scientific articles have been published, including a Nature Chemical Biology article, as well as a number of congresses, lectures, press releases.
- Due to the promising results of the project so far a new company has been created.
- New jobs have been created in all participant SME's and Research institutions.
