The current trend in drug discovery is to develop drugs with a high level of selectivity for a single receptor. Although this is a real improvement for certain therapeutic areas, this may present a real issue for the development of novel treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders. Indeed, neuropsychiatric disorders are complex, multigenic disorders that involve multiple neuronal circuits. Therefore, it is not surprising that many of the most efficacious drugs in psychiatry, such as clozapine, are considered """"""""dirty drugs"""""""" (i.e. have multiple targets), that were discovered by screening in vivo, i.e. looking at their behavioral impact using various animal models, rather than making predictions of their function based on their receptor profile. Although attractive, this approach was neither efficient nor scalable until now. PsychoGenics is developing a proprietary, high throughput, in vivo platform known as Smart Cube TM, which is being used to screen and select drug candidates with potential to treat major psychiatric disorders including depression, psychosis, and anxiety disorders. This approach examines the behavioral response of a mouse to various challenges under normal and perturbed (e.g. drug treated) conditions. Using computer vision algorithms, behavior is captured and bioinformatic tools are applied to reveal the temporal behavioral profile or """"""""signature"""""""" in response to treatment. PsychoGenics is building a database of signatures for known and approved compounds, which it can use to compare to the profiles of NCEs. PsychoGenics aims to demonstrate that this behavior-driven approach to drug discovery can yield clinical candidates selected from high quality libraries designed with compounds that have drug-like chemical and structural properties. The goal is to screen 120 compounds in Abstract compounds in Smart CubeTM in Phase I to find """"""""hits"""""""" which, with the aid of novel computational chemistry algorithms, undergo behavior-driven (i.e. Smart Cube TM) lead optimization in Phase II. Using this behavior-driven approach, PsychoGenics has already identified two compounds for the treatment of ADD.
