Optivia Biotechnology has secured a $1.8m two-year Phase II small business innovation research (SBIR) grant, from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The federal grant is expected to help advance the understanding of central nervous system (CNS) physiology and develop new tools to help design CNS drugs, identify new drug targets, expand drug indications, and manage potential drug side effects.
The SBIR grant will be used for funding the development of a broad set of transporter assays and a large prescription drug database to better understand the interaction between drugs and major physiologically important transporters found throughout the CNS.
Membrane transporters are special proteins that carry drugs, neurotransmitters, hormones and other large and small molecules across the cell membrane.
Optivia Biotechnology chief scientific officer Dominique Bridon said the first aim of the research project is to develop assays for about 30 human CNS drug transporters, resulting in the most comprehensive collection of cell-based CNS transporter assays commercially available to academic and pharmaceutical researchers.
"These new assays will remove a critical bottleneck in the study of CNS transporters and the development of drugs for important CNS diseases such as depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy, as well as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases," Bridon added.
The research is also aimed to profile the interactions of about 350 CNS prescription drugs with over 20 CNS transporters, creating a database that could show previously unforeseen relationships between the pharmacological properties of drugs and their clinical outcomes.
Optivia president and chief executive officer Yong Huang said, "This grant will enable us to build on our successful Phase I studies to provide innovative tools for understanding the effects - both positive and negative - of inhibiting critical transporters in the CNS, yielding information that could lead to the development of more effective drugs with manageable side effects."
