HTG Molecular provides highlights of second event in KOL webcast series

HTG Molecular Diagnostics provides a summary of its second HTG Therapeutics key opinion leader webinar: "The Role of RNA Profiling in Drug Discovery and Analysis," hosted on Tuesday, December 13, 2022. In this latest webinar, Dr. Robert Spitale of the University of California, Irvine, delved into the many potential roles for RNA profiling in drug discovery and development and how it can be leveraged to improve the selection of lead compounds. Dr. Spitale described how RNA, an information-rich molecule, has the potential to provide valuable insights into the effects, mechanisms of action and toxicity concerns of potential drug compounds. Scientists have historically seen the difficulty of scaling RNA profiling as the primary barrier to fully utilizing RNA profiling in drug screening. Dr. Spitale noted that HTG’s EdgeSeq technology is designed to make RNA profiling scalable, allowing for expedited wet-lab processing and data analysis, enabling the efficient screening of compounds with the many other benefits that RNA profiling provides. HTG also provided a real-world example of how its team has used RNA profiling to differentiate between several compounds targeting mTOR in development of its transcriptome-informed approach to drug discovery. This study has allowed the team to specifically describe differential regulation of the ferroptosis pathway by closely related compounds. Ferroptosis is an alternative cell-death pathway, and its regulation represents a promising cancer therapy target. Dr. Stephen A. Barat, Senior Vice President and head of HTG’s Therapeutics business unit, commented: "We believe the working example we cited using several compounds sharing mTOR as a pharmacologic target illustrates the principles of this approach and how we now have successfully reduced to practice an easily scalable model of transcriptome informed drug discovery and design. We expect to apply this approach agnostically across therapy areas to bring forward candidate small molecules more quickly and cost effectively increasing the chances for success in development by virtue of the greater insight RNA profiling provides when applied early at this stage of drug discovery." This same approach is currently being applied to HTG’s compound libraries for the company’s first drug candidate, which will be further discussed in early 2023.