Tuesday, July 23, 2024 - Pluto Bio, developer of the modern, multi-omics platform for target discovery, announced today that the Wyss Brain Targeting Program will utilize Pluto’s platform in their discovery of novel targets to transport therapeutics into the brain.
Delivery of drugs to the brain continues to present a great challenge in development of more effective treatments for brain disease. Poor brain delivery is one major factor in the frequent failures in clinical trials of drugs for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, brain cancers, and other brain diseases. Most drugs cannot efficiently cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) to reach their optimal therapeutic concentration in the brain. The Wyss Institute at Harvard University established its Brain Targeting Program to help address the critical unmet need for precision delivery of drugs to the brain, creating an R&D hub and pre-competitive collaborations among diverse stakeholders including pharma and biotech, to rapidly discover brain targeting shuttles that can help revolutionize the treatment of brain diseases.
At its annual Sponsors and Partners Meeting last week, the Wyss Institute Brain Targeting Program announced it will use Pluto’s target discovery software platform to analyze and visualize -omics data, curate evidence from a variety of published literature sources, and integrate these findings with expert insight from Wyss Institute scientists to efficiently identify and prioritize genes and proteins with transport capacity that can significantly increase drug transport into the brain.
This effort brings together Pluto's cutting-edge, collaborative software platform for drug discovery and the Wyss Brain Targeting Program's unique pre-competitive industry-sponsored research program to discovery and engineer antibody-based brain transport shuttles. Pluto launched from the Wyss Institute in 2021 to empower researchers around the globe.
"We're delighted to support the Wyss Brain Targeting Program, whose pioneering approach to industry-academic partnerships and world-class team of experts is uniquely positioned to make ground-breaking advances in next-generation approaches for the treatment of brain disease. With this collaboration, we are proud that Pluto’s drug discovery software will be supporting the Brain Targeting Program team’s vision to synthesize a vast amount of data and knowledge to engineer shuttles that have the potential for life-changing impact in the field," said Rani Powers, PhD, Founder & CEO of Pluto Bio.
“The Pluto Bio team has developed customizable user interfaces that help our scientists integrate, visualize, and analyze large amounts of transcriptomic and proteomic data from a large and growing number of public and proprietary data sets. We needed help to enable our scientists to organize, annotate, and access the large and growing amount of information in our search for new brain transport targets. We also sought to incorporate established AI tools into our platform in order to accelerate our discovery of new targets and new shuttles. The Pluto platform and team have provided outstanding support in pursuing these milestones and advancing our search for new transport targets in order to enable the development of more effective treatments for diverse brain diseases”, said James Gorman, M.D., Ph.D., PI of Wyss Brain Targeting Program.
About Wyss Institute Brain Targeting Program
The Wyss Brain Targeting Program is advancing brain delivery approaches that enable more safe and effective brain-targeted therapeutics. The team actively collaborates with companies and academics to tailor their brain shuttles for drug delivery of specific payloads and diseases. Read more about the Brain Targeting Program at: https://wyss.harvard.edu/collaboration/brain-targeting-program/
About Pluto Bio
Pluto Bio is the modern, multi-omics drug discovery platform built for driving scientific initiatives and outcomes. Pluto empowers scientific teams to analyze experimental data, build curated knowledgebases from published literature and proprietary company research, and integrate insights into actionable dashboards, reports, and presentations that enable faster, higher-quality decision-making. Learn more about Pluto at: https://pluto.bio