Our Approach.

Traditional approaches to neurotherapeutics discovery have resulted in decades of unsuccessful research because they rely mainly on animal models of disease that don’t capture the unique aspects of human biology and disease.

Herophilus is reinventing neuro drug discovery by combining human brain models, scaled biology and machine learning to systematically discover and develop novel drugs with greater therapeutic potential for complex brain diseases.

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Human models of brain disease.

We use patient stem cell-derived brain organoids to model brain disease. Starting with stem cells, we capture the genetic and human specific disease biology typically absent in animal models.

We then use our advanced organoid technologies to generate brain region specific organoid models containing neural and glial cell type diversity, synaptic connectivity, tissue architecture and neural network activity.

Collectively, brain organoids provide unique access to human specific brain biology previously out of reach and unlock the next wave of neuro drug discovery.

Automation-enabled scaled biology.

Automation and scaled biology lie at the heart of our drug discovery approach.

Our integrated automation, software and analytics platform supports long-term culture and assay of thousands of high quality and reproducible brain organoids, enabling us to harness the biological richness of brain organoid models.

Highly curated and scaled biological datasets allow us to pursue both target-led and phenotype-led drug discovery and develop a deeper understanding of human brain disease and identify truly disease modifying therapies.

Machine learning and advanced analytics.

We apply leading-edge data analytics and machine learning approaches to integrate large scale high-dimensional phenotypic datasets and create comprehensive systems biology descriptions of brain disease.

These “deep phenotypes” lie at the core of our drug discovery approach and reveal paths to new disease-modifying therapeutics for brain diseases with greater probability of clinical success.

Deep phenotypes provide continued support throughout the drug development process, informing translational research and companion diagnostics.