GATC Health says the new drug candidates discovered by its proprietary AI drug discovery and prediction platform to treat opioid use disorder (OUD) and fentanyl addiction have entered pre-clinical development.
GATC is partnering with Christie D. Fowler at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and global scientific testing company, Eurofins Discovery, for the pre-clinical programs to determine the novel drug candidates’ safety and efficacy in reducing opioid consumption, withdrawal symptoms and relapse.
To discover these specific drug candidates for OUD, GATC obtained addiction drug target biomarkers from Liquid Biosciences, an AI-based biomarker discovery company, and created a detailed disease model with its multiomics advanced technology (MAT) platform. The platform then assembled and analyzed thousands of potential drug compounds, ultimately delivering a small set of drug candidates that could directly affect the root causes of addiction.
Safety potential
These drug candidates are designed to support the brain’s ability to change and adapt in response to experience, restoring natural levels of dopamine and reducing brain inflammation. The effects from this type of treatment have the potential to be safer for the patient and could provide a significant advantage in both short and long-term recovery.
GATC recently released a study showing that its platform can successfully predict drug success with 88% accuracy, and forecast drug failure with an 84% accuracy rate. With improvements in both speed and accuracy, GATC said it has proven an 11-fold increase over the current industry lead optimization success rate of approximately 8%.
“We purposely directed our AI drug discovery and prediction platform to pursue the discovery of potential treatments for fentanyl addiction and opioid use disorder, diseases that are incredibly difficult to treat, an area of huge unmet patient need and one that has legislative, policy and tens of billions in funding support,” said Jeff Moses, president of GATC Health.
“Our platform, in mere months, has potentially uncovered the missing link in neurological disease treatments—a breakthrough discovery that has incredible implications for the opioid epidemic and other areas of medicine.”
With the platform’s new drug discovery, GATC has the potential to improve other treatments such as addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, major depressive disorder (MDD) and other neurological diseases.
400tn data points in seven minutes
GATC Health said its AI platform reduces risk, time and cost in developing more effective drugs and treatments. GATC can analyze a massive amount of disease-specific data, with an AI solution that understands the core biology of a disease and can mimic a human environment for the discovery and validation of novel drugs.
The company’s MAT platform can analyze 400 trillion biological data points in seven minutes and simulate biochemical interactions to accurately predict the response of a pharmaceutical asset to a specific disease. The MAT platform can develop one to three novel drug candidates in three to six months with the ability to support end-to end services across research and development.
“GATC’s drug candidates for fentanyl and opioid addiction treatment focus on gently stimulating rewiring of the brain’s emotional reward circuits, without causing the wide swings in neurohormone levels that typically lead to substance abuse,” said Robert Sorrentino, chief medical officer of GATC Health.
“Essentially, the compounds remove the roadblocks to recovery and send a signal telling the patient’s body to start its recovery process and return to a state of equilibrium.”