Benzinga | Dec 16, 2021 07:13AM EST

Cerevel Therapeutics And Herophilus Announce Collaboration To Evaluate Novel Neuroimmune Modulating Therapeutic Strategies for Schizophrenia

Cerevel Therapeutics (NASDAQ:CERE), a company dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the brain to treat neuroscience diseases, and Herophilus, a leading biotechnology company developing neurotherapeutics to cure complex brain diseases, today announced a phased multi-year, joint research collaboration in neuropsychiatry. The collaboration integrates the deep expertise in neuroscience drug discovery at Cerevel Therapeutics with state-of-the-art disease models and the AI-enabled deep phenotyping from Herophilus.

Herophilus' proprietary neuroimmune patient-derived brain organoids and neuroimmune genetically engineered brain organoids are designed to overcome the limitations of traditional animal models by incorporating human-specific genes with known relevance to schizophrenia. Leveraging these advanced in vitro humanized systems enables the potential discovery, evaluation, and prioritization of novel therapeutic strategies that may be missed through standard approaches.

"Research and development for neuroscience diseases is difficult, and schizophrenia in particular can be incredibly challenging to address due to the variable components of the disease such as positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms," said John Renger, Ph.D., chief scientific officer at Cerevel Therapeutics. "The science and cutting-edge approach that this collaboration brings to the table has the potential to reveal core mechanisms of schizophrenia and disease-modifying approaches to treat it. Utilizing Herophilus' innovative models is one of the many ways we are creating a prolific neuroscience drug discovery and development engine at Cerevel Therapeutics."

Phil Iredale, Ph.D., head of biology at Cerevel Therapeutics added, "Increasing our confidence in the translatability of preclinical models is a primary concern of neuroscience research. The potential to incorporate human genetics into a reproducible and scalable in vitro system, that emulates some of the complex synaptic biology of the brain, provides an attractive platform for novel target discovery. We are looking forward to working together with Herophilus to advance new and much-needed breakthroughs in treatments for schizophrenia."

The therapeutic strategies pursued under this collaboration are novel and are designed to enable the development of therapies with the potential to improve or reverse several aspects of schizophrenia. The multi-modal deep phenotyping approach from Herophilus applies advanced, large-scale data analytics with high-dimensional phenotypic datasets to create a comprehensive systems biology approach that may lead to the identification of therapeutic candidates with disease-modifying potential.

"Our innovative approach at Herophilus is designed to capture the relevant biology that traditional models of schizophrenia have previously been unable to address, allowing us to now ask the most critical questions about the disease," said Saul Kato Ph.D., chief executive officer at Herophilus. "We are pleased to collaborate with Cerevel to leverage the power and uniqueness of our rich disease models and systems biology approaches in a new era of drug discovery for the most complex brain diseases."

Sharath Hegde PhD., chief scientific officer at Herophilus added, "This collaboration is a powerful opportunity to apply our sophisticated brain organoid discovery engine towards the discovery of paradigm-shifting therapeutics that may revolutionize how schizophrenia is treated in the future."