Mechanism-based CNS Disease Modeling: Applications in Neurology and Psychiatry Drug Research & Development

This webinar featured Dr. Hugo Geerts, Chief Scientific Officer of In Silico Biosciences, who discussed “Mechanism-based CNS Disease Modeling: Applications in Neurology and Psychiatry Drug Research & Development.”

Dr. Geerts holds a bachelor’s degree in theoretical physics, a bachelor’s degree in medicine, a PhD in biophysics, and a master’s in pharmaceutical sciences. He has almost 20 years of experience in drug discovery and development as a research fellow at the Janssen Research Foundation, where he headed the Alzheimer discovery research. In addition to his work at In Silico Biosciences, a company that provides mechanistic disease modeling services in CNS research & development, Dr. Geerts is on the faculty of the Perelman School of Medicine (University of Pennsylvania) and the Drexel University Department of Pharmacology.

In this webinar, Dr. Geerts will discuss “mechanistic disease modeling,” which is based on mathematical models of relevant human brain circuits that are derived from well-defined physico-chemical and physiological data from preclinical models. In addition, these are parameterized with neuropathology, imaging, clinical, and genotype data from patients to which the neurophysiological effects of over 30 different neurotransmitter receptor systems have been added. Currently, the model is clinically calibrated for schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Huntington’s disease. To demonstrate this work, Dr. Geerts will show examples where the model has proven to be of value in CNS research & development projects, including three blind predictions of clinical outcomes with new molecular entities (NMEs).