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Science and Technology

Alzheimer’s Therapies:
Alzheimer’s disease is a debilitating neurodegenerative disease and the most common form of dementia. Symptoms include irritability, confusion, mood swings, language difficulties and memory loss. Cognitive dysfunction becomes more pronounced as the disease progresses, leading to the loss of bodily functions and eventually death. AD is characterized by the presence of amyloid plaques in the brain. Soluble beta-amyloid (Abeta) oligomers are thought to underlie the cognitive deficits associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Our first-in-class novel therapies pharmacologically compete with Abeta oligomers for critical receptor targets preventing synapse loss and improving memory. Our small molecule therapeutics act through molecular targets that have not been previously implicated in AD.

Left: Our novel small molecule therapeutic competes with toxic Abeta oligomers (red) for critical receptor targets on the surface of neurons.
Right: In the absence of the drug, Abeta binds to neurons and impairs synaptic function

Proprietary Screening Platforms:

Cognition has developed a number of screening strategies and used these to identify small molecules capable of blocking the central toxicity of soluble oligomeric proteins in Alzheimer’s disease and other related disorders. These assays emphasize functional biological responses of neurons to the toxic soluble oligomers and thus capture effects on multiple molecular targets.

A major advantage of these screens over those used by most pharmaceutical companies is that the outcome is not the blocking of the receptor binding or kinase activity, but rather the gain of neuronal function. Furthermore, this proprietary screening technique has been validated by predicting in vivo efficacy. Importantly, this information-rich platform provides an opportunity to discover new targets for therapeutic development.

In addition to the biological screening platform, Cognition’s propriety chemistry platform is also critical to the company’s success. This platform exploits readily available natural product scaffolds to prepare novel, drug-like compounds for screening. Using these platforms, the company is building a pipeline of novel small molecule drug candidates that address diseases of the central nervous system caused by abnormal protein folding or aggregation. Cognition’s biology and chemistry platforms can be configured to model a number of neuro- degenerative diseases, each representing high unmet areas of medical need.