TELOMICS®

Most if not all drug development programmes depend on the prior identification of appropriate target structures. Despite breath-taking new technologies as Genomics and Proteomics, the identification and validation of truly disease-related targets remains very critical. Once a target has been identified and validated, the screening of a fast growing number of compound collections of either natural or synthetic origin can be performed extremely fast in order to select hits interacting with this target. However, high through put screening (HTS) does not rely on biological effects. Thus, HTS hits must be evaluated under model conditions mimicking the pathophysiology of the respective disease as close as possible and with acceptable through put. Unfortunately, current test series often compromise either the first or the second matter. In particular, subcellular or cellular studies reflect complex physiological scenarios insufficiently, whereas whole animal experiments, although covering this aspect, are slow and expensive.

KeyNeurotek’s TELOMICS® technology, relying on cerebral tissue cultures (lat. tela = tissue), provides a strategy to overcome major bottlenecks in discovery and preclinical drug development, i.e. target identification/validation or efficient screening of HTS-positive compounds.