Through this unique partnership, the Baltimore-based Insilico Medicine and Lethbridge-based CCARL will provide expertise in aging research and build on the personalized medicine and drug discovery platforms OncoFinder and GeroScope to develop new systems for age-related diseases. During the first phase of collaboration, Insilico Medicine and CCARL drug discovery and personalized medicine efforts will focus on Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Plantbiosis will simultaneously validate the system, experimentally.
Through its agreement with the University of Lethbridge, Plantbiosis has access to state of the art gene expression, sequencing, epigenetic research, metagenomic, cell line banks and cell culture facilities. It also brings over five years of experience in data acquisition, mining and processing and complements access to infrastructure with a team of trained scientists and technicians.
"Aging is a true global pandemic, which kills more people daily than any other disease and extending productive longevity will not only decrease pain and suffering, but will also provide a significant boost to the global economy. However, before we can look for interventions that may be effective in slowing down the aging processes, we need to understand the systemic changes in defensive and pathological states in many age-related diseases. We started this journey in cancer and now we are going after other diseases that will help us gather the data for a grand plan of attack on aging. And while we are already helping improve decision making in clinical oncology with OncoFinder, we are happy to collaborate on development of a platform to better personalize disease modifying drugs for treatment of multiple sclerosis", said Olga Kovalchuk, MD/PhD, MBA, CEO of Canada Cancer and Aging Research Laboratories, Ltd.
During the course of collaboration, the companies will build a statistical database of tissue-specific changes in signalome, interactome and epigenome in a variety of age-related diseases and normal aging to understand the intricate interplay between pathologic and defensive states.
"We are very happy to partner with CCARL and Plantbiosis led by the highly-productive ambitious and driven scientists, who are looking beyond classical approaches to age-related disease research and are going after the grand prize, which is aging. They are looking to change the biomedical paradigm from treatment to prevention and are the only companies in Canada with the vision and tools to do that", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.
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