Crossing the ultimate barrier to improve brain disease treatments
Help us cross the ultimate barrier to new brain disease treatments
We invite individuals, foundations, companies, or others wishing to partner with the Brain Targeting Program to get in touch to discuss how you can help to defeat brain disease. If you’d like to start a conversation, please reach out to Jonelle Prill-Tate.
Help us cross the ultimate barrier to new brain disease treatments
We invite individuals, foundations, companies, or others wishing to partner with the Brain Targeting Program to get in touch to discuss how you can help to defeat brain disease. If you’d like to start a conversation, please reach out to Jonelle Prill-Tate.
The Wyss Institute's Brain Targeting Program is developing shuttles that dramatically improve delivery of drugs to the brain.
We know more than ever about brain diseases – their causes, their impact on patients and families, and potential approaches to their treatment. But drugs developed for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, brain cancers, and rare genetic disorders of the brain often fail in the clinic because these drugs cannot cross the blood brain barrier (BBB). In 2019, the Wyss Institute established the Brain Targeting Program to confront this challenge and improve outcomes for the millions of patients suffering with brain diseases.
The Brain Targeting Program at the Wyss Institute is a pre-competitive, multi-partner industry collaboration that aims to identify novel transport targets and shuttle compounds to enable more effective delivery of drugs to the brain. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University
Diseases we are targeting
Neurodegenerative Diseases: Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS
Brain Cancers: Glioblastoma multiforme and metastasis
Rare Brain Diseases: Enzyme deficiencies such as Pompe’s & Lafora’s disease
Targeting of drugs to the brain continues to present one of the greatest challenges in medicine today. For Alzheimer’s disease, almost 300 experimental drugs have been tested in more than 1,000 clinical trials over the past 10 years. Sadly, 99.6% of these trials failed, in part because the drugs could not reach their optimal concentration in the brain. Even in breast cancer, one-third of patients treated with Herceptin die due to brain metastases that are inaccessible to the drug. New brain targeting approaches are urgently needed to improve the lives of millions of brain disease patients and their family members.
Creating a premier center for engineering brain-targeted drugs
At the Wyss Institute, we join the freedom of academia with the focus of industry to solve seemingly impossible problems. The Wyss Brain Targeting program focuses on two major areas, which together enable dramatic improvement in treatments for multiple diseases of the brain.
This animation explains how Wyss Institute researchers and their industry partners aim to identify novel transport targets and shuttle compounds to enable more effective delivery of drugs to the brain. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University
First, we are discovering and developing new brain transport shuttles that are safe and effective. Our first-generation Wyss brain shuttles increase uptake of test drugs into the brain by 10- to 100-fold. These shuttles will improve transport of new drugs and will rescue drugs that failed to cross the BBB in past clinical trials.
Second, we are developing novel brain-targeted therapies that could enter clinical trials within the next 5 to 7 years. These new therapies have the potential to greatly improve treatment for diverse brain diseases.
We are ready to conduct proof-of-concept pilot projects in diverse brain diseases and to launch ambitious long-term projects to translate these discoveries into exponentially improved brain disease treatments.
Gathering competitors in novel collaborations to discover new brain targeting technologies
The Wyss Brain Targeting Program is organized as an R&D hub to promote collaboration among diverse stakeholders, including competing companies and academic labs. Our first pre-competitive project supported discovery of brain-targeting shuttles that can benefit all participants’ drug programs while advancing the entire field. During the past 3 years, this project attracted discovery support from 8 companies and 2 government agencies. With the help of these industry-academic interactions, we have discovered brain targeting shuttles that can help revolutionize treatment of brain diseases. We are now beginning to combine these shuttles with known and novel drugs to invent brain-targeted therapeutics for treatment of specific brain diseases.
The complexity of this problem makes it challenging for individual research institutions or companies to solve on their own. This collaboration offers a compelling opportunity to discover new approaches for drug delivery to the brain.
Richard Hargreaves, Senior Vice President and Head, Neuroscience Thematic Research Center, Bristol-Myers Squibb
“To sit next to her, to hold her hand, but know that the person who was playing with me and spent so much time with me doesn’t know who I am and is not there is the most difficult part. It’s hard to see your grandmother doesn’t recognize you anymore.”
Ana Raquel Santa Maria has been inspired to Reimagine the World with better understanding, treatment, and prevention of brain diseases after seeing her grandparents suffer as they age, especially her grandma who has dementia. Read and listen to Ana tell her story.
Help us cross the ultimate barrier to new brain disease treatments
We invite individuals, foundations, companies, or others wishing to partner with the Brain Targeting Program to get in touch to discuss how you can help to defeat brain disease. If you’d like to start a conversation, please reach out to Jonelle Prill-Tate.