Turning drug discovery into speed dating

Thamani Dahoun and Margaux Duchamp, cofounders of ArcoScreen © 2022 Arcoscreen - EPFL spin-off ArcoScreen has developed a platform that turns the discovery of new drugs for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, diabetes and cancer from a marathon into a sprint. The firm's microfluidic readout system assesses the response of G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) to new substances, delivering significant time and financial gains for pharmaceutical companies. The drug discovery process is often like looking for a needle in a haystack. On average, some 500,000 molecules will be assessed before a drug comes to market - and this process takes around 20 years from start to finish. In the early stage, firms select drug candidates for the target disease, submitting each molecule to a four-step review process that takes several hours to complete. The test developed by EPFL spin-off ArcoScreen provides the same result in just 15 minutes. What's more, the test can be used directly on target patient cells, achieving more reliable results than the traditional approach using less realistic genetically modified cells, thereby reducing failure rates in the later stages of the process.