BioSymetrics, Brigham and Women’s Hospital awarded NIH STTR grant

Lunai Bioworks’ BioSymetrics announced the award of a Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Institutes of Health. The funding, awarded jointly to BioSymetrics and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, will support the development of a novel platform that combines artificial intelligence and in vivo zebrafish screening to accelerate drug discovery for Alcohol Use Disorder, a disease affecting more than 19 million Americans and substantially contributing to the development of both oncologic and neurologic disorders. The grant is a fast-tracked Phase I and Phase II application awarded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism with a total value of $1.85M, contingent upon determination that the Phase I milestones were achieved. The joint program, co-led by Dr. Calum MacRae, Vice Chair for Scientific Innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, will unite expertise in AI-driven behavioral phenotyping with large-scale drug screening models. The platform will integrate BioSymetrics’ proprietary machine learning tools with experimental phenotyping capabilities developed in Dr. MacRae’s lab. The project aims to deliver both a scalable discovery engine for AUD as well as novel small molecules that could form the basis for future therapies.