$2.3-million grant awarded to U of T researcher and two biotechnology companies for Parkinson’s drug development
Summary
A $2.3-million grant has been awarded to a University of Toronto researcher involved in a partnership with Cyclica and Rosetta Therapeutics to develop drugs for Parkinson’s disease. The three-year grant from Genome Canada is to support drug discovery related to treating people with the long-term neurodegenerative disease and will involve the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The grant’s recipients are G. Angus McQuibban, an associate professor in U of Ts department of biochemistry and chief scientific officer of Rosetta Therapeutics, and Cyclica, a biotechnology company in Toronto that uses artificial intelligence. In April 2017, a partnership was announced between Lewis and the McQuibban lab at U of T and Cyclica, which specializes in using artificial intelligence and computational biophysics in the drug discovery process. In practice, however, a drug is likely to interact with a number of proteins, sometimes up to 300 in the body, leading to unforeseen and adverse side effects,” says the Genome Canada announcement about the grant.