Greenstone Biosciences Receives NIH R61 Grant to Advance Cardiac Fibrosis Therapeutics for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
Award supports an iPSC and AI-driven drug discovery program targeting the leading cause of death in DMD patients
Greenstone Biosciences, a biotechnology company advancing New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) for drug discovery, today announced that it has received a Catalyze R61 award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award funds a research program to discover novel drug candidates for myocardial fibrosis and dilated cardiomyopathy in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD).
DMD is a rare genetic disorder, affecting about one in every 3,500 baby boys worldwide. Heart problems, especially cardiomyopathy, are common in people with DMD and are the main cause of death. Corticosteroids can help delay heart failure and improve survival, but more than a quarter of patients either cannot tolerate them or do not respond to this treatment. Currently, there is no approved therapy that directly tackles the heart scarring caused by the disease, which is exactly what this program aims to address.
Using its induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) biobank and cardiomyocyte disease models, Greenstone will combine unbiased proteomics, computational drug screening, and generative AI to identify and validate new drug candidates for DMD cardiomyopathy. The Catalyze program is structured in two phases. The current R61 phase supports target identification and early candidate discovery. If successful, the program will advance to an R33 phase, which would fund the synthesis, characterization, and testing of promising compounds in vivo before moving on to IND-enabling studies.
