Disease Modelling and Drug Discovery in Neurological Disorders
Zameel Cader,
Director and Principal Scientist, IMI StemBANCC,
University of Oxford
The StemBANCC project is an Innovative Medicine Initiative (IMI) project supported by the European Union. It is a collaborative effort between 11 pharmaceutical companies, 22 academic institutions and 2 small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The aim of StemBANCC is to generate and characterize induced pluripotent stem (iPSC) cell lines from 500 patients with a wide range of diseases, including central nervous system disorders, peripheral nervous system disorders, and diabetes. The main scientific goal of StemBANCC is to try to identify cellular phenotypes of disease – this will enable us to study the disease mechanism in human cells and to screen for compounds reverse disease cellular phenotypes. Neurological disorders such as migraine and Alzheimer’s Disease are hugely prevalent and debilitating. Understanding disease mechanism has been hampered by difficulties in accessing relevant tissue. Through iPSC technology, it is possible to identify disease signatures for these conditions and suggests new targets and phenotypes for drug discovery programmes.
|
|
