Liquid Brain: Neuromorphic sensing and computing platform for high-throughput screening of antibody developability

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Drug development costs are rising and pharmaceutical R&D efficiency is falling, increasing costs for BioTech and Pharma companies, healthcare providers, and reducing affordability and accessibility for patients worldwide.90% of drug candidates fail during clinical-stage development. Poor developability accounts for one third of clinical-stage failures of biologics, costing approximately USD450M per drug developed. High-throughput screening technologies deployed in the critical hit-to-lead phase of drug discovery are used to evaluate thousands of potential drugs against the drug target. Yet, comprehensive assessment of key biophysical properties associated with drug developability remains severely restricted by resource and time constraints, including limited material availability, particularly for biologics.Apoha is a stealth-stage start-up (UK SME), founded in 2021 by Dr Shamit Shrivastava (inventor of Apoha's core platform technology; ex-postdoctoral researcher, University of Oxford) and Anshika Srivastava (ex-Executive Director/Vice President, Goldman Sachs). Our mission is to create a new paradigm for sensing and computing that is powerful and sustainable at scale, inspired by the physics of brain matter.We are developing a "liquid brain", a neuromorphic fluid-based technology that mimics neuron-like activity when it is exposed to a chemical. The fundamental science behind our innovation was highlighted by Scientific American in 2018 as a "Revolution in Science that could change everything".With Innovate UK support, we will apply our "liquid brain" platform technology to the challenge of poor antibody developability, by developing a neuromorphic sensing and computing platform for high-throughput screening of underlying biophysical properties. We will combine our proprietary and patented hardware with cutting-edge neuromorphic algorithms trained to rank antibodies based on their developability potential.Our innovation directly addresses a key barrier to global transformative research highlighted in the UK Innovation Strategy 2021, that of declining pharmaceutical R&D efficiency and the rising cost of drug development.