7/31/2023 0 Comments Manifold bioRather than verifying lab tests, “It’s more for informing design. “The way it works is we attach an extra bit of protein, our protein barcode, and that makes the protein trackable and we can track it wherever it goes in a system,” Kuznetsov said. Illustration of multiple “barcodes” attached to proteins to be tested in vivo. To make this happen it has invented a “protein barcoding” tech that you might think of as molecular RFID tags. Manifold’s innovation is parallelizing in vivo testing with up to a hundred simultaneous tests in a single mouse. One goes in each mouse and you observe what happens - and there’s a real chance all of them will flunk at this crucial stage. If you can have more conviction that this is the right drug to be investing in, you can address the key risk of your investment.”Ĭurrently, at the mouse testing phase, you generally have a target condition and a handful of candidate drug molecules. We’re optimizing much earlier, so once we’re at that final gate of going to clinical tests, we’re moving forward with a drug that has already been optimized. “But as you get further in a drug development program, you’re investing more and more, to do more and more expensive experiments and work. “The best test environment is reality,” explained the founder and CEO of Manifold Bio, Gleb Kuznetsov. The startup, armed with $40 million in Series A funding, aims to make mouse tests a hundred times more efficient and effective, changing that equation and enabling earlier in vivo testing that verifies a molecule’s function before you dump a few million bucks’ worth of resources into it. But it also is the first - and often the last - time any of these drugs actually has to work in a real body, and the result is many washing out.Įnter Manifold Bio. Because this is such a logistically challenging and time-consuming part of drug testing, it is usually left until there are only a handful of molecules the company or lab is fairly confident will work. And the general equation there is: one drug, one mouse. In vivo means “in life,” as opposed to in vitro (in glass) or in silico (simulated), and mice are the usual critters that get the dubious honor of testing out a new drug’s safety and efficacy. You don’t have to know what all of those do, however, to understand that in the end, no matter how much they accelerate fundamental research, in vivo testing remains a major bottleneck. The drug discovery space has advanced a lot in the last few years, first with fast and cheap gene transcription, then with CRISPR then with AI-powered proteomics. Manifold Bio’s molecular machinery could let a hundred molecules be tested simultaneously in a single living system, potentially upending the whole process. In the creation of a new drug, there comes a point where you have to finally put the molecule in a real creature - one at a time - and see if it actually does what you think it does.
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