A $225,000 grant is fueling a startups research to identify how new drugs work at the molecular level – radically cutting down a timeline that averages 10 years (and a couple billion dollars) to bring a drug to market. They’re working on a genetic screening process they say can identify which genes are most important to how a drug works.
“The NIGMS grant was actually our second NIH grant within the last year,” Bio-I/O principal Tim Peterson, Ph.D. told the 4thEst8. “The total value of both grants is $1.95 million. The first, larger ‘fast track’ grant from NIDDK is to use our CRISPRi/a-based approach to develop drugs for diabetes and NASH.”
The recent grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (part of the National Institutes of Health) will help Bio-I/O develop its CRISPRi/a platform. The company is collaborating with the Dean of the School of Medicine at Washington University, St. Louis, as well as the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk on drugs for neurodegenerative disease and diabetes.
Some Science:
CRISPR is a genome editing tool. It is essentially an enzyme, called a ‘nuclease’, that pulls apart a double helix strand of DNA like a zipper. Bio-I/O is working with a variant that doesn’t pull the strand all the way apart, rather, it ‘zips’ it apart partially – forming a “Y” looking strand of partially unzipped DNA. Then a deactivated nuclease steps in and attaches a strand of RNA to an unzipped end in a process called ‘transcription’. That’s where the i/a part of CRISPRi/a comes in. They stand for ‘inhibition’ and ‘activation’. Depending on what RNA is attached, whatever that part of the genome does is either inhibited (slowed down) or activated (sped up). So if it made something like a protein, it would make more or less protein, depending on what Bio-I/O wants it to do.
“Drug development gets slower and more expensive over time,” Peterson said. “Our solution to this problem is a CRISPR-based approach to do genome-wide screening in human cells – CRISPRi/a. This technology is uniquely valuable to understanding how drugs work and don’t work.”
Last year the company landed a grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The “fast-track” grant for $1.72 million is for Bio-I/O to use its approach to develop drugs for diabetes and NASH – liver inflammation and damage caused by a buildup of fat in the liver.
