Cambria Biosciences Presents New Screening Model for Epilepsy Drug Discovery at Society for Neuroscience Meeting.

WOBURN, Mass. -- Cambria Biosciences, a biopharmaceutical company focused on brain disorders, today presented new research findings in epilepsy drug discovery at the 36th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Geoff Stilwell, senior scientist at Cambria, presented a poster describing a novel screening method for antiepileptic drugs that utilizes a powerful genetic model organism, the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

Dr. Stilwell found that a neurotoxin commonly used to induce seizures in experimental rodents when testing for anti-epileptic drugs also causes seizure activity in fruit flies. Cambria researchers then engineered a screening system to systematically test chemical compounds for their ability to block the toxin-induced seizures in specially bred strains of fruit flies. Because fruit flies can be handled in very large numbers, the Cambria assay allows for a much larger number of chemical compounds to be screened for their anti-epileptic therapeutic potential in a faster and more cost-efficient manner than is possible using laboratory rodents alone.

Dr. Stilwell noted, "Although genetic studies have shown that the functions of genes and proteins are highly conserved between fruit flies and humans, we were surprised by how many known human anti-epileptic drugs also prevented seizures in our Drosophila system. Screening in Drosophila allows us to detect novel anti-seizure compounds in a way that is high-throughput, sensitive, and specific."

Dr. Leo Liu, Cambria's president, commented, "Because epilepsy is a disease that involves the neural circuitry of the brain, testing for potential therapeutic compounds in whole animals with an intact nervous system, as opposed to biochemical assays or single cell types, makes a lot of sense from a physiological point of view. This assay using a simple laboratory organism gives us a means of tapping into more novel chemistries that could lead to new drugs for the many epileptic patients who are not effectively treated by the current generation of anti-seizure medicines."

Cambria's study was conducted in collaboration with the laboratory of Troy Littleton at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, and is being concurrently published this month in the European Journal of Neuroscience.

A related poster presented by Cambria scientists covered research on genetic methods to identify drug and toxin targets. These studies provide a proof-of-concept approach that has been broadly implemented at Cambria for drugs or toxins of unknown function. The research group found GABA receptors, a class of ion channel proteins that regulate neuronal excitability, are the target for the neurotoxin. GABA receptors are also important drug targets for epilepsy, anxiety, pain, and anesthesia. Dr. Stilwell and others isolated multiple new mutations in a Drosophila GABA receptor to shed light on the neurophysiology and pharmacological responses of this drug target.

Cambria Biosciences is a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to neurodegenerative diseases and other central nervous system disorders. The Company's approach uses living genetic model systems that faithfully recapitulate disease processes to discover new drug leads for these underserved medical conditions. Cambria leverages its technology platform for other applications, including agriculture and animal health, and has partnered with industry leaders in these fields to accelerate the discovery and development of safe and effective new products.