Overview

Originally founded in 1998 as a functional genomics company, AGY Therapeutics now uses its imAGYne platform to analyze models of central nervous system diseases, and aims to identify new therapeutics that interfere with signaling pathways for lead-candidate development. The company has programs in stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, epilepsy and brain tumors.

The company plans to find partners to develop and commercialize markers of CNS conditions while out-licensing drug targets and diagnostic opportunities, as well as lead compounds. Others will be kept in-house for development.

The imAGYne platform offers an approach to delineating the intra- and extra-cellular signaling pathways underlying the pathological progression of disease. The platform consists of multiple automated technologies that span target identification, characterization and validation. Unique to this platform is the comprehensive molecular analysis of the disease process at multiple timepoints.

The platform consists of five key steps: animal disease models; gene discovery; sequential expression profiling using proprietary cDNA array technology for sensitive high-throughput quantitation; building pathway models with informatics and functional analysis; and target validation.

With its proprietary imAGYne, imArrays and imFormatics platforms, AGY also has built a knowledge base of the neuroprotective capacities and vulnerabilities of the nervous system.

Partners

Current collaborators include Baylor College of Medicine in Alzheimer’s disease; Duke University in epilepsy; Johns Hopkins University in Parkinson’s disease; the University of Chicago; the University of California, Davis; the University of Hamburg, Germany, in brain cancer; the University of Lund, Sweden, in stroke; and the Institute of Enzymology in Budapest, Hungary.