High-Throughput, High-Dimensional (HT-HD) Phenotyping of C. elegans for ALS Drug Discovery
Abstract
Improved pharmaceutical treatments will improve the lives of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS); however, many compounds that appear promising during early-stage development fail when tested in animals and humans. As a result, drug development is a long and costly process that discourages many companies from working on rare disease like ALS. One way to catalyze ALS drug development is to drive down development costs with more accurate methods to predict drug efficacy. Our project will help create a new paradigm for low-cost drug development by preforming early-stage drug screening in small animal models for ALS. This early-stage testing in tiny animals like the roundworm C. elegans will help ensure that drug candidates are safe and effective before performing time-consuming and expensive tests in mouse models. Our 2-year development plan will create microdevices that will rapidly measure neural activity, cell health, and behavior in these tiny animals. These state-of-the-art devices based on nanotechnology and automated imaging processing will analyze animals more than 100 times faster than any currently available technique. Using this technology, we will perform the first drug screen in small animal models for ALS. These results identify novel drug candidates and lay the groundwork for a new low-cost development pipeline drugs and drug combinations that treat ALS.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 31, 2017
- Source ID
- W81XWH1610110
Entities
People
- Jacob T Robinson
Organizations
- Rice University
- United States Army