Senfina Biosystems LLC
Senfina offers in vivo whole life drug discovery services for aging and age-related diseases based on a multi-feature high-throughput imaging platform using C. elegans as a model organism.
The Problem
Aging is a complex and slow progressing biological phenomenon. This makes the development of novel therapeutics time consuming and costly. With many biological processes involved, investigating a new treatment requires studying whole organisms in a comprehensive fashion. Long lifespans and expensive maintenance make measuring aging and related traits in mammals inherently low throughput. Assessment of aging in short-lived invertebrate model enables moderately high-throughput, but current approaches typically only measure lifespan without providing information on the state of the underlying molecular processes that drive aging.
The Solution
Senfina’s technology combines automated imaging of C. elegans nematodes in a high throughput fashion. C. elegans is a valuable model organism due to its brief lifespan (~3 weeks) and high functional genetic homology to humans. Powerful genetic tools combined with C. elegans’ transparent body structure allows precise monitoring of the activity and cellular location of molecular pathways of interest using fluorescence tags. Beyond normal aging, C. elegans models are available to target many human diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and mitochondrial disease. Many of the most promising drugs and molecular pathways under investigation for human aging were first found to impact aging in C. elegans. Senfina’s multi-feature C. elegans experiments combine cutting-edge genetic tools, robotic imaging, and artificial Intelligence-enabled image and data analysis to provide predictive models for drug discovery and optimization.
The Opportunity
Senfina’s technology provides the means to evaluate many drugs and genetic drug targets for the impact on lifespan and quality of life through behavioral observations, while simultaneously proving information on molecular response of target pathways through fluorescent imaging in the same animals. Single-animal culture systems allow the same individual animals to be tracked over the course of their lifespan, enabling molecular processes to be connected to health outcomes as single-animal resolution. This simultaneous collection of multi-dimensional information enables these evaluations to be conducted in a cost-effective, timely, and scalable fashion.
Longevity biotechnology is a growing market driven by an increasingly older population and the accelerating prevalence of age-associated diseases. An increasing decline of cognitive and muscular abilities of particular prominence and well-suited to study in C. elegans. This technology opens ways for the differential monitoring of these developments in tens to hundreds of thousands of individuals at single-animal resolution.
Due to the increasing lifespan of humans, the age-related degenerative diseases and the need for their management are on the rise. The Longevity and Anti-Senescence Therapy Market is currently around $26B with an anticipated annual growth of about 6.5%.
Status
The screening and imaging instrumentation is well advanced into the prototype stage and the software has been used to analyze screening outcomes. Multi-channel fluorescence imaging allows to simultaneously capture molecular in addition physiological changes in response to both challenges and treatments in C. elegans. On the instrument axis, an academic as well as a more powerful commercial version are anticipated.
Meet the Team
George Sutphin PhD
College of Science
Samuel Freitas MS
Emily Gardea MS
Peter Nestler PhD
Tech Launch Arizona
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Senfina offers in vivo whole life drug discovery services for aging and age-related diseases based on a multi-feature high-throughput imaging platform using C. elegans as a model organism.
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