Exin Therapeutics recently launched!
"Precision genetic therapies targeting neural activity."
TLDR; Exin Therapeutics is developing genetic therapies targeting neural activity for people suffering from neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. They are tackling conditions like epilepsy, debilitating symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and Parkinson’s disease by focusing on the neural circuitry of the brain.
Founded by Gabriel Ocana Santero, Ivan Lazarte & Marko Tvrdic
A team of 3 Oxford-educated neuroscientists. Gabriel is a biochemist with a wealth of research experience in neural development, gene therapy, and NeuroAI. He holds a PhD in Pharmacology from Oxford. Ivan is a physicist by trade and has worked in molecular biology, circuit, and systems neuroscience. Ivan’s brother suffers from ASD and Ivan is on a mission to improve the quality of life for patients suffering from debilitating neurological conditions. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from Oxford. Marko has experience with iPSC models, retinal disorders, and circadian and developmental neuroscience. During his PhD, he worked in systems and behavioral neuroscience and holds an MSc from Oxford.
Why is this important?
Millions of people around the world suffer from neurological disorders. These disorders arise from imbalances in brain activity. Think of it like an orchestra where some instruments are playing too loud while others are too quiet. This “bad music” / neural imbalance—what they call excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) imbalance—is the root cause of many symptoms in these disorders. For example, in epilepsy, overactive circuits lead to seizures, while in ASD, it can cause sensory hypersensitivities - where individuals feel overwhelmed by normal sounds, lights, or touch that most people wouldn't even notice. These disregulations in neural circuits impact how the brain processes information and responds to the world, leading to the debilitating symptoms they see in these disorders.
The solution
Exin Therapeutics is taking a circuit-level approach to treating brain disorders. Instead of trying to restore missing genes, they are supplementing already existing genes that they know will be directly changing the neural activity in the brain - in the direction that they want and independently of the genetic background.
They are also working on an AI model to streamline their preclinical R&D.
Here’s why: developing therapies for the brain is hard. Every candidate needs to be tested for its ability to modulate circuits, and doing that through a traditional drug development preclinical pathway is a slow process.
Because of that, they use ML to analyze high-density screening data and prioritize which assets are worth testing further. They use neural activity, behavior, and transcriptomics to train multimodal AI models that identify the drivers of the disease, which are not observable by conventional analytical methods.
Then, they use these models to (1) predict the potential of their therapies to treat particular indications and (2) provide an efficacy readout during their internal experimental testing. This way, they spend their time (and funding) testing the most promising candidates.
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