Accelerated drug discovery for schizophrenia

In 2022, scientists from The Florey secured $500,000 in funding to enhance their capacity to undertake next-generation drug discovery through a new biotech spin-out LASEREDD Therapeutics.

The funding from CUREator – a biotech incubator backed by the Australian Government’s Medical Research Future Fund and run by Brandon BioCatalyst – launched the spin-out to identify and develop new and improved medicines for schizophrenia.

Approximately 1% of the population experiences schizophrenia or related mental health conditions. These people are underserved, with doctors having only a limited repertoire of anti-psychotics to improve certain aspects of these diseases, often with debilitating side effects.

There is a major need for treatments with improved efficacy and fewer side effects. Launched from a project led by Associate Professor Daniel Scott, Dr Christopher Draper-Joyce and Professor Ross Bathgate, LASEREDD Therapeutics hopes to meet this need.

The spin-out uses a proprietary new technology platform to facilitate more targeted drug discovery against a class of cell surface proteins known as G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Associate Professor Scott says that while 30% of approved prescription medicines act via binding to one or more of the over 500 different GPCRs in our body, developing safe and effective drugs that act against specific GPCRs is a major challenge.

“With our next-generation platform technology, we aim to overcome significant barriers that have hindered GPCR drug discovery – enabling the next generation of medicines with improved therapeutic efficacy whilst reducing side-effect liability, improving outcomes for patients with unmet needs,” said Associate Professor Scott.

“The funding from CUREator will enable us to accelerate our antipsychotic platform validation study, grow our team of scientists, and demonstrate the huge promise of our technology for developing new medicines across a range of diseases.

“GPCRs are involved in nearly every physiological process in our bodies, they are very important molecules in a huge range of diseases and conditions – and that’s why I’ve spent the past two decades developing new methods to study them,” added Associate Professor Scott.