Healthtech company Nurosene Health Inc., which provides innovative AI-based technology solutions to enhance mental performance and well-being, is partnering with Cyclica Inc., which has the vision to develop the most robust drug discovery pipeline in the nation. Through this agreement, Nurosene will access one of its key proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) tools, NetraHealthAtlas, to accelerate drug discovery for neurodegenerative diseases, a market worth over USD $40 billion1. The partnership agreement also includes a milestone payment schedule for the commercializing party, as well as royalty payments to be paid by the parties under license agreements.
The Chief Scientific Officer of Nurosene, Dr. Joseph Geraci, PhD., 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.”
The discovery phase will be led by Nurosene via NetraMark, which identifies specific drug targets. Through this partnership, NetraHealthAtlas will demonstrate its ability to accelerate the identification of drug targets and reduce the time and costs associated with bringing a drug to market. Using machine learning, Nurosene’s NetraHealthAtlas generates insights about patient populations and disease aspects. By analyzing individual patient sub-populations, NetraHealthAtlas builds highly accurate hypotheses about invisible causes of a disease and then recommends ways to deal with it by examining the biochemistry involved. Through the stratification of patient data into accurate sub-models NetraHealthAtlas enables the discovery of unobtainable insights, which are not attainable with traditional AI and methods.
Naheed Kurji, Cyclica’s President, CEO, and Co-Founder outline his enthusiasm for the partnership, stating: “We’re thrilled to be continuing to build our biotech pipeline of the future on the global stage alongside Nurosene. The NetraHealthAtlas has the ability to triangulate diseases by offering sets of targets that can work together. This unique feature fits beautifully with our poly-pharmacological approach at Cyclica, where we can attack the disease from multiple approaches simultaneously.”
With Cyclica’s AI-enhanced drug discovery platform, NetraHealthAtlas’ drug targets can be identified efficiently and discover novel drug candidates for these targets. Cyclica’s polypharmacology platform will be able to predict molecular candidates for selected protein targets by using Nurosene’s technology to generate lists of protein targets from patient-level genetic data in various types and will then be able to test the molecular candidates for disease altering properties.
