NETSseq's Impact On Cerevance's Approach to Drug Discovery

Pharmaceutical Executive: How does the NETSseq platform shape Cerevances approach to the drug discovery strategy?
Craig Thompson: Yeah, NETSseq is great platform for us. So it originally developed out of the lab in the Rockefeller. And what makes NETSseq unique versus really anything else,anyone is able to do, is we use post mortem human brain tissue, and we have about 20,000 samples. About 10,000 of those are from people who did not die of CNS disease, and about 10,000 from people who died of various CNS diseases or with a CNS disease. And what NETSseq allows us to do is actually go into the individual cell and get the full transcriptome. So that's about 12 to 15,000 genes per cell. So we get a lot of data. And as I mentioned, we if we're looking at a disease, say, like Alzheimer's disease, for example, some of the people that we'll look at, or some of the brain samples we'll look at are from patients, again, who did not die of Alzheimer's disease. Some probably died of another cause, say, a motor vehicle accident, were early in the disease and then some later in the disease. So what we're able to do with NETSseq, using machine learning and AI approaches, is actually create a longitudinal progression of what gene is up regulated or down regulated by cell type. So it's really bringing kind of static information and bringing a third dimension to it, so we can see longitudinally how that disease has progressed. So I think that gives us a lot of insights into, for example, how Alzheimer's progresses. So it's not a disease, it's probably a multitude of diseases in different presentations of a similar disease, and we're able to do the same thing for things like FTD, ALS, Parkinson's disease, and really bringing novel insights into it. I would say, 10 years ago, you probably couldn't do this because you just hadn't have the AI machine learning capabilities that you do today. So we're right now over 70 trillion data points, which is pretty impressive. So it really gives us great insights.