Small molecules based therapy and systems cell biology
Network Therapeutics in The New Drug Discovery Company
Our ‘Cellular Phenotype based Drug Discovery’ program is the only valid alternative approach for small molecule drug discovery pertaining to the therapeutic areas of neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases and the set of pathologies collectively referred to as chronic inflammatory diseases. These indications have in common a shift in one, or more than one, physiological quantity from its normal homeostatic range to an ‘unhealthy’ steady state level. These alterations are robust, under the control of multiple components, their occurrence is the result of the combination of multiple environmental and genetic events and the shift from the healthy distribution to the unhealthy distribution happens over a long asymptomatic period of time. Consequently, the primary assumption of this ‘Cellular Phenotype – based Drug Discovery’ is that a therapeutic response will be elicited at the condition that more than one molecular components of the biological system are acted upon. The corollary of this aforementioned statement is that the behavior of human physiology cannot be predicted from the behavior of its parts in isolation. We propose a cell biology-driven approach to drug discovery that will involve screening compounds by response profiling in disease models based on complex human-cell systems.