MDI Bioscience Projects
MDI Bioscience is collaborating with the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and The Roux Institute at Northeastern University in an interdisciplinary effort to discover and develop new therapeutic compounds.
With donor support and a National Science Foundation award, the project is exploring Bigelow’s library of 3,000 strains of ocean algae, tapping into this biological diversity to discover disease-fighting compounds.
Bigelow provides the algae extracts, while the Roux Institute contributes powerful computational analysis to identify promising molecules within. MDI Bioscience, in turn, is engineering lines of transgenic zebrafish that mimic specific human diseases and conditions. Researchers will expose the fish to promising algal compounds for real-life testing of how they affect a vertebrate animal’s condition, such as inflammation caused by PFAS “forever chemicals” and other toxins, complement (immune) system activation (seen in autoimmune disorders), acute kidney failure and bacterial infection.
Repurposing a diabetes drug to preserve blood vessel health as we age
For more than a decade, a class of drugs called SGLT2 inhibitors have been a useful tool in the fight against diabetes and related kidney damage. Now, the research group of Hermann Haller, M.D., is using African turquoise killifish (ATK) to explore the drugs’ potentially beneficial effects on aging vasculature, particularly the body’s smallest, vital blood vessels—the microvasculature—that deliver oxygen and nutrients into our organs, while removing waste and toxins.
African turquoise killifish are an emerging platform for discovery whose short lifespans make them ideal for aging studies. Haller’s team measured vascular health in killifish at various stages of life, finding that fish treated with SGLT2s maintained dramatically healthier vasculature at older ages. The results, previewed in BioRxiv as a preprint article, suggest that new SGLT2-inhibiting therapies to slow or avert vascular decline could leverage wide-ranging health benefits for the entire body.
Because SGLT2 inhibitors are already approved for human use, the initiative could bypass the enormous research and development costs of bringing an entirely novel drug to market. Haller’s research group, led by Anastasia Paulmann, M.D., has been working for two years to develop ATK as an efficient model for human aging, and the recent findings mark a proof of principle in the effort.
An emerging solution for skin pigmentation disorders
MDI Bio Lab Assistant Professor Romain Madelaine, Ph.D., recently secured a patent for ML233, a compound that shows promise in treating skin disorders like vitiligo and hyperpigmentation (including sunspots), and, potentially, certain types of melanomas.
Using genetically altered zebrafish (an increasingly utilized research model for human health) and lab-grown human tumor organoids, Madelaine’s team found ML233 could effectively regulate skin pigmentation without producing harmful side effects that are seen in some current therapies.
The ML233 project highlights another key MDI Bioscience value; supporting innovators such as Madelaine and his team as they explore entrepreneurial methods to bring discoveries from lab bench to market, and into the hands of consumers, doctors and patients.
With MDI Bioscience’s support, the next step is testing ML233 on functioning human tissue grown in a state-of-the-art “skin-on-a-chip” platform. The Madelaine lab recently won a National Institutes of Health InsiteXccelerator award to fund this stage of development, which will focus on both effectiveness and safety.