Insilico Medicine Collaborates with Gray Matter to Fight Age-related Cognitive Decline

The prevalence of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) rises from 6.7% (1 in every 14 people) for ages 60–64 to 25.2% (1 in every four people) for the 80–84 cohort. People diagnosed with MCI are 3-5 times more likely to develop dementia of some form. With the adult population growing older and the increase in the need for health and social services, the public health community is challenged to be proactive. This is particularly important as these issues can impact not only older adults but also their families and friends who act as caregivers.

Peptide therapy is well suited to develop treatments for chronic conditions such as MCI. There is a considerable amount of longitudinal data on peptides which indicates that the class may present a more favorable risk-benefit profile as compared to interventions based on gene therapy, cell therapy and other novel approaches. Moreover, the production of peptide-based drugs can be more cost-effective compared to other novel drug types.

“We aim to develop a new generation of safe and effective therapies to help patients live longer, healthier lives with their cognition intact. We see a remarkable synergy between our rapid iterative approach based on proprietary peptide discovery engine Reptide and AI-powered target discovery by Insilico Medicine. This collaboration is intended to help Gray Matter further to reduce costs and timeline for early drug development,” said Alexey Strygin, co-founder and CEO of Gray Matter.

“Insilico is advancing its latest target identification systems utilizing machine learning, generative biology methods, and synthetic data generation pipelines, and we are pleased to be collaborating with Gray Matter on its target identification efforts. Searching for peptide targets is an important modality of the target discovery in general, and we are happy to apply our technology in this challenging area,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine.