InSilico Medicine, CCARL collaborate to improve personalized medicine projects in multiple sclerosis

Insilico Medicine to fund CCARL's pilot research study in personalized medicine and aging research.

InSilico Medicine, the company focused on drug discovery for cancer and age-related diseases, announced its investment in a research collaboration with Canada Cancer and Aging Research Laboratories, Inc (CCARL). The companies will collaborate on improving decision making in clinical oncology and discovery, and personalized medicine projects in multiple sclerosis (MS).

"Dr. Olga Kovalchuk was included into Canada's 40 under 40 and 25 most influential women in the Canadian market for a very good reason. We were very impressed by the level of enthusiasm, expertise and quality of scientific research in genetics and epigenetics in her lab at the University of Lethbridge. CCARL has many innovative ideas on how to apply aging research to drug discovery and personalized medicine and accelerate human trials. They came up with a very clever trick on how to extrapolate some of the personalized medicine in oncology to multiple sclerosis. Their world-class team brings decades of experience in epigenetics, metagenomics and proteomics and approaching aging from a completely new angle which may result in practical applications within the next several years. Solving aging will require a concerted global effort and we would like to partner with one of the top research teams in Canada", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.

The mechanisms and causes of multiple sclerosis (MS), an inflammatory disease on nerve cells, are not fully understood. MS commonly reveals itself between ages of 20 and 50, and results in significant decrease in life expectancy and loss of productivity. This partnership aims to advance knowledge and science dedicated to this disease and more.

"To my knowledge CCARL is the first company in Canada to engage into personalized medicine in clinical oncology with the aim to better understand the underlying age-related pathologic processes and use that knowledge for geroprotectors discovery", said Evgeny Makariev, director of aging research at Insilico Medicine, Inc.

"We are happy to receive an investment from and establish a research collaboration with some of the world's top thought leaders in Big Data analysis for aging research. We are already using the OncoFinder platform for improving decision making in clinical oncology and will be using a significantly more expanded system for MS. Understanding MS will help us unlock several misteries of aging at once", said Olga Kovalchuk, PhD, CEO of CCARL.