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An open map of drug effects
The gap in drug testing
Pharma companies hold huge compound libraries, but they mostly test a compound against specific off-target receptors listed as important for safety or toxicity. Otherwise they start with one disease and test compounds against the receptors involved in it. Testing many compounds against many targets and many diseases means far too many combinations.
The open matrix
EvE Bio is trying to create that matrix. It runs all FDA-approved molecules against a set of receptors on cells to see what happens, and posts the data openly, so anyone can click around on its website and look for drugs with effects nobody thought to check.
It is a Focused Research Organization, a time-limited, single-mission nonprofit founded with the plan to finish in five and a half years.
How do cell assays show a drug's effects?
Researchers engineer cells to carry one receptor, then add a compound and measure a signal such as a rise in calcium or in a chemical messenger called cAMP. Robots run thousands of these tests in plastic plates with hundreds of tiny wells. A large class of receptors called G protein-coupled receptors is the target of roughly a third of FDA-approved drugs, according to a 2017 analysis in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.
How did open data speed up genomics?
In 1996, leaders of the Human Genome Project agreed at a meeting in Bermuda that DNA sequence data should be released publicly within 24 hours of being produced. The rule kept any one company or lab from locking up the human genome sequence. Researchers around the world could then use the data right away to look for disease genes. The finished human genome was announced in 2003.
How did Focused Research Organizations begin?
The idea was proposed in 2020 by Adam Marblestone and Sam Rodriques as a way to do work that is too large for a university lab and unprofitable for a company. Convergent Research, a nonprofit, helps launch them. Each one has a fixed budget, a single goal, and a planned end date.
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