GNS Healthcare, CHDI Foundation Renew Huntington's Disease Research Collaboration
In order to speed efforts toward effective treatments, GNS Healthcare and the CHDI Foundation are continuing their collaboration to research potential genomic and molecular targets to treat Huntington’s disease.
The new project intends to use a special computational system designed by GNS to process a large collection of data that the biomedical research organization, CHDI, has gathered. This data includes genomic, molecular, phenotypic, and other sign points which manifest in the onset of Huntington’s disease.
Iya Khalil, co-founder of GNS explains, “Our inference engine finds cause-and-effect relationships in large data sets that up until now could not be easily identified. The work is designed to better understand the cause of the disease, leading to early intelligent interventions that slow progression.”
This project is the latest in ongoing collaborations between the two companies, both of which hope to use technology to break down collected data and develop tools used to understand a complex and devastating disease. A previous project used CHDI data to design predictive computer models of Huntington’s pathology which helped inspire and direct future research.
Research and development is a process that can take decades, thousands of man-hours and frustrating dead-ends, costing drug developers upwards of $1B. Using a computer cloud-based technology, researchers can investigate and gauge probability of success more accurately and speed discovery towards an effective treatment.
Huntington’s is a degenerative brain disorder which slowly debilitates a person’s motor, behavioral, and cognitive functions. The disorder, at present, has no cure and only one treatment. According to the Huntington’s Disease Society of America, a quarter of a million Americans either have the disease or are at risk of developing it.
Within the past month, there have been a few promising announcements of research success. Scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine have successfully reprogrammed and transplanted skin cells into the brains of mice and found that the cells behaved similarly to native cells and survived up to six months.
Isis and Roche have recently formed a collaboration, which will launch phase 1 clinical trials for ASO-HTT-Rx — a drug targeting the gene responsible for instigating the disease — in early 2015.
According to the CHDI press release, GNS has implemented its technology with other non-profit groups dedicated to finding treatments for incurable disease, such as multiple sclerosis, childhood asthma, Alzheimer’s disease, and others.