TechBio Startup Developing Targeted Therapeutics for Vascular Disorders
Blood vessels are designed to ferry blood around the body to keep tissues and organs healthy. Viruses, bacteria, and toxins can attack blood vessels, making them leaky. When fluids leak out of blood vessels, blood can’t circulate around the body properly, which means organs don’t get enough oxygen and nutrients, so they can start to shut down. The leaked fluid can flood different organs, like the lungs, making it difficult for patients to breathe. This is called Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and is a major cause of death in diseases like COVID-19. In fact, ARDS is notoriously difficult to treat and is the biggest killer of ICU patients.
So rather than treating the symptoms, digital biotech company Akttyva Therapeutics is going straight to the root cause. With their proprietary AI-assisted AIDE-360 platform, Akttyva is discovering and developing therapies that regulate endothelial permeability to stop blood vessels from leaking. This technology won’t just help with ARDS because leaky blood vessels are the underlying cause of more than 60 other medical conditions.
Akttyva’s first product candidate, AKT-001, is a first-in-class small molecule that they are repurposing for ARDS. The molecule has already undergone safety testing for another indication, which will accelerate the drug development process.
Akttyva’s AIDE-360 platform selects small molecule candidates with good safety profiles. They then further screen candidates via wet lab experiments. They wanted to set up templates to streamline and standardize their experiments and facilitate result analysis. They also wanted to improve their inventory management.
“We have built an efficient AI-powered drug discovery engine. We wanted an equally elegant solution to streamline our confirmatory experimental biological testing and feed our wet lab results back into AIDE-360 to improve accuracy.” Katya Tsaioun, CEO and Co-founder, Akttyva Therapeutics.
Scispot designed and planned personalized templates and Labsheets for Akttyva’s specific molecular biology techniques (e.g. a Western Blot result Labsheet), making it quicker and easier to execute experiments, analyze data, and visualize results.
Scispot also integrated barcode scanning to help Akktyva manage inventory, compounds, and samples.
