Israel’s Itay&Beyond, a drug discovery platform company, is harnessing brain-on-a chip technology and the power by AI to derisk the drug development process and help pharmaceutical companies develop more effective treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Some 254 million people around the world struggle with one or more neurological and psychiatric problems, affecting more than 3% of the global population. Yet, the chances of a new drug being efficient in the clinic after successful preclinical studies are about 1%, says CEO and Co-founder neuroscientist Dr. Nisim Perets.
“Nothing works so far to accurately predict the efficiency of drugs, so we needed to develop a new, radical approach,” he says.
Itay&Beyond is named after Itay, the son of co-founder Shmulik Bezalel, who has autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Bezalal, an experienced technology entrepreneur, approached Perets about establishing a company after reading about the neuroscientist’s work on new methods of developing drugs. Bezalel wanted to know if it would be possible to simulate the brains of autistic children to determine what the impact would be of a particular drug on cognitive function or memory or learning ability.”
Perets took on the challenge, joining forces with Bezalal and entrepreneur Boaz Goldman to create Itay&Beyond in 2021.
The Israeli startup’s novel approach involves extracting cells from a patient’s urine and culturing these into pluripotent stem cells that can be used to develop brain organoids, a tissue that is artificially grown in vitro and resembles a patient’s own functional brain.
The startup’s chip-based system creates a closed loop, stimulating the organic tissue with electricity, mimicking crucial brain characteristics and functions and recording its electrical activity.
Itay&Beyond uses a model it developed to compare the difference in the activity of molecular patterns in the patient and a control group, providing new insights into drug efficacy and brain function, Perets says. The goal is to determine if it is possible to help patients by narrowing the deltas. While there are no known cures for ADP, it might be possible to improve the brain tissue’s information processing and help ease the symptoms of other neurological disorders such as epilepsy and schizophrenia.
Itay&Beyond is currently testing its technique on ASD patients at the Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem, and on epilepsy patients at the Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikva, Israel. It is also conducting a pilot with a small pharma company in Israel. “They have their own compound they want to test, and we are developing our own drugs for the sub population of autism and epilepsy that we want to test,” says Perets.
“To come up with molecules is the easiest part,” he says. “To make it work, to know if a molecule can do what you think it can do in clinical trials, this is the difficult part. Our claim is that our technology can more accurately predict how drugs will impact the functioning of people’s brains.”
The company has been self-funded by the partners to date. “For a biotech company to do what we have done in 3 ½ years – to develop this kind of tech and proof of concept – with about $ 3 million is a real accomplishment,” says Perets. “In a year and a half more or less we will be ready to complete all the validations needed to do large joint development projects.”
It is an example of how the intersection of AI and biology can radically transform drug development, he says.
“A lot of people ask why this has not been done before,” says Perets. The answer is that the ability to covert cells into active brain tissue was only developed about five years ago. Each lab grown brain tissue produce astronomic amounts of data per minute, which was impossible to analyze before the latest advances in AI. “We now have both the technology and the analytical tools to do what was recently considered impossible,” he says.
Perets says Itay&Beyond does not aim to be either a diagnostics company or a developer of personalized medicine. The company’s business model is to work with pharmaceutical companies to help them understand the efficacy of drugs for neurological and psychiatric disorders before launching clinical trials, which take about 10 years and cost around $1 billion.
Itay&Beyond will indicate to pharmaceutical companies which molecules have the best chance of succeeding based on its process. “We get money for the derisking at the beginning of the process,” says Perets. “We have the patents, and they license our patents and if our molecule becomes a successful drug we will get about 2% of sales.”
The company says it is currently looking for outside partners and to raise private capital to further develop the business.
Thanks to research funding from the European Union, researchers at the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory in Braga, Portugal, have also been working on using brain-on-a-chip technology to develop more effective treatments for serious neurological disorders.
Itay&Beyond says it believes it is closer to commercialization of the technology.
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