Daily Archives: September 12, 2014

Google has a mission to organize the worlds information and make it accessible to everyone. The companyis mostly known for its search engine and the largest mobile operating system, but you may not be aware that Google is also heavily involved in the life sciences sector. Google has invested in a number of biotech and life science companies through its venture capital arm, Google Ventures.

Lift Labs

Yesterday, Google acquired Lift Labs. Lift Labs is a company that has built a high-tech device handle, which can stabilize what is being held using an attachable spoon or fork. This type of device benefits someone that has Parkinsons Disease or Essential tremor (ET). The Lift Labs team is joining the Life Sciences division at Google[x], which is a skunkworks lab led by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

DNAnexus

DNAnexus is a DNA sequencing data software company that works with several genome sequencing organizations to better understand human genetics contributing to heart disease and aging.Last year, DNAnexus partnered with Baylor College of Medicine to process 3,751 whole human genomes and 10,771 exomes. DNAnexus uses Amazon Web Services cloud computing to sequence DNA data and store it.GoogleVentures invested in DNAnexus$15 million Series B and $15 million Series C round of funding.

Rani Therapeutics

Google Ventures participated in an undisclosed Series B round for Rani Therapeutics in August 2013. Rani Therapeutics is working on developing technology for the oral delivery of large drug molecules, which are delivered through injections.Rani Therapeutics is currently in pre-clinical studies and demonstrated over 50% bioavailability.

SynapDx

SynapDx is a company that provides laboratory testing services to physicians who work with children that have development disorders. The goal is to enable earlier detection of autism. In July 2013, Google participated in a $15.4 million round of funding for SynapDx.

One Medical Group

Original post:
Google Continues To Build Upon Its Life Sciences Ecosystem

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Newswise (New York, NY Sept. 11, 2014) A research team from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai today received a $12 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a center that will screen massive data sets for new uses of existing drugs, and confirm them in human cell tests. The centers first mission will be to find FDA-approved drugs that reduce side effects when paired with hundreds of leading drugs against common, deadly diseases.

With advances in inexpensive computing power, and stored data collections becoming truly massive in the era of big data, researchers are just now able to design algorithms and models that pull previously unrecognized disease and drug treatment patterns from databases. These computational patterns are predictive, and researchers can validate them with experiments.

The goal of our new center is to detect changes made in human heart, liver and nerve cells as otherwise useful drugs cause side effects, and to find the combinations of existing drugs that reduce these side effects, said Ravi Iyengar, PhD, the Dorothy H. and Lewis Rosenstiel Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics within the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and the lead investigator for the center grant.

Our center embodies a third way to reduce the side effects that limit the use of so many treatments, along with two traditional approaches: fine-tuning a drugs chemical structure or tailoring its use for each individuals genetics, he added.

Hidden Signatures The new grant will fund a Drug Toxicity Signature Generation Center at Mount Sinai as part the NIH Common Funds LINCS program, the Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures program. Each signature is a confirmed set of genetic and protein responses within a type of cell to a drug or drug combination.

The team will find such signatures by combining high-throughput experiments on cell responses to drugs with statistical analyses of side effect, gene and protein interaction databases. Interestingly, the team starts with stem cells and then converts them into the heart, liver and nerve cells used in the experiments. The new centers goal is to generate 2,000 signatures per year for further testing.

To anchor the signatures to human diseases and treatments, the team will search the U.S. Food and Drug Administrations Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) database to find cases where adding a second drug reduced the side effects associated with a commonly used primary treatment. FAERS has for decades collected such data from individuals, health professionals, drug companies and hospitals, and the millions of records on patients taking multiple drugs now in this public database are free and open to all researchers for analysis.

To translate FAERS-generated drug combinations that reduce toxicity into networks of mechanism-based cell response signatures, the team will then run the experimental results through other databases, including NIH databases of human DNA sequences and interactions between proteins. These networks will be filtered using sophisticated modeling techniques to increase the reliability of the signatures. The most promising signatures can then form the basis for targeted animal and human clinical studies on drug repurposing.

Read the rest here:
Center to Find Drug Combinations that Reduce Side Effects