Angelini Pharma launches an Open Innovation Challenge in Epilepsy

New digital approaches to target discovery in Epilepsy

• The challenge will be focused on advanced digital approaches for drug discovery
• The initiative is part of a broader strategy, to support Angelini Pharma growth plan in brain health

Angelini Pharma launches an Open Innovation challenge in Wazoku Crowd, where millions of change makers from anywhere help companies find bespoke solutions to business problems. The challenge aims to enrich and complement Angelini Pharma commitment in Brain Health, through innovative ideas from the scientific community.

“The identification of the right drug target remains challenging, particularly for brain diseases. However, digital approaches for better target identification are progressing rapidly. Thus, with this challenge we are seeking innovative ideas related to digital approaches for target discovery in epilepsy. This is an attempt to make progress in Brain Health by leveraging the power of a global community with particular focus on drug-resistant epilepsy” – said Rafal Kaminski, Chief Scientific Officer of Angelini Pharma.

Epilepsy is a heterogeneous group of chronic brain diseases with various etiologies, seizure types, and different syndromes, affecting altogether more than 50 million people globally. Despite the availability of more than 25 antiseizure medications, approximately one-third of epilepsy patients have drug-resistant seizures, highlighting the need for the development of novel, more effective therapies.

Most drugs available and in development for treating epilepsy provide only symptomatic treatment of seizures, and a significant proportion of patients do not respond to those medications. Despite the increasing availability of experimental data and information on epilepsy – for instance from literature or open databases – there are currently few published examples of data-driven target discovery (in particular for drug-resistant epilepsy) and for this reason, the impact on drug discovery and development remains limited.

Through this challenge, Angelini Pharma expects to receive innovative ideas on how to collect, process, analyse and/or integrate data for target discovery in drug-resistant epilepsies. Those ideas could build on existing data and tools in bioinformatics, computational biology and artificial intelligence, in a way that is novel, or used in a way that is novel.

The challenge will be online for a period of 45 days.

Angelini Pharma will select at least one submitted solution, based on theoretical evaluation of the proposals received.

Find out more about Challenge #1, prizes and eligibility criteria here.