Educational Article
Using Machine Learning to Harness the Complexities of Inflammasome Biology for Novel Drug Discovery
December 1, 2022
•
20 minutes
Spring's case study in untangling inflammasome pathways involves a tight collaboration between biologists and engineers who worked together to design experiments and develop AI tools to interrogate inflammasome biology.
Inflammasome biology is complicated — there are multiple inflammasome pathways and complexes, with different activation steps that can drive the different pathways.
It's also critical for us to understand and be able to drug these, as dysregulation of these pathways has been linked to a variety of human diseases — some acute, like respiratory distress syndrome, and some that are more chronic such as rheumatoid arthritis.
See how the Spring Engine is used to identify subtle inflammasome inhibitor MoA’s
Because of these strong connections between inflammasome biology dysregulation and disease, a lot of companies in the pharmaceutical and biotech spaces are heavily invested in understanding and targeting these pathways
So far, these targets have been fairly narrow, mostly focused on nlrp3 as it's one of the main inflammasome complexes. This approach is a bit limiting, because there's a lot more complex biology going on here.
But being able to untangle this biology requires new tools and a new approach. See our slides and video above to uncover how the Spring Engine enables such novel approaches at drug discovery amidst complex disease states involving multiple pathways.
AUTHORS
Rachel Jacobson, Ben Komalo, Ahmed Hosny, Sarah Headland, An Nguyen, Wendy Cousin, Lauren Nicolaisen, Brandon White, Christian Elabd