Alexigents (Resilience-Enhancers)

Around the dawn of the 20th century, Louis Pasteur discovered the fundamental principle of vaccination: that medicines could prevent disease. However, no one ever thought to apply this principle of primary prevention to psychiatric diseases. Alexigent, a neologism from the Greek alexo (meaning “to protect”), refers to an emerging drug class that enhances stress resilience and induces protection against psychiatric disorders. Alexigents are the first preventative psychopharmaceuticals in development. If they successfully translate from the bench to the bedside, alexigents could protect people predictably at-risk for PTSD and depression: frontline workers, soldiers, firefighters, cancer patients, humanitarian aid workers, refugees—anyone predictably exposed to trauma or major life stress. To learn more, check out Publications & Press, FAQs, and the original research paper.

Social Outcomes-based Finance

US prescription drug spending is on the rise, decreasing medication accessibility and increasing the financial burden on the healthcare system. Much of this cost is driven by the expensive process of new drug development; which can take 10-12 years, cost $1-2 billion per drug, and is highly risky (1:10,000 success rate). Despite the resources invested in the drug development pipeline, many high-burden medical conditions remain unmet needs. Social outcomes-based finance incentivizes new low-cost treatments for unmet medical needs using patented novel social impact tools. Ideation for this initiative was supported by Helena and Sunrise, and incubated by the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell University.

OASiS (Original Antigenic Sin Immunosurveillance)

SARS-CoV-2 may be a "novel" virus, but not to our immune systems. Pre-existing memory antibodies from seasonal coronaviruses are reactivated upon SARS-CoV-2 exposure. Depending on which specific regions in SARS-CoV-2 proteins those antibodies target, the response can either be protective (mild disease) or inefficient/deleterious and increase inflammation (severe disease). Though other groups have speculated on the risk of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) in COVID-19 or that immunity from seasonal coronaviruses may be protective, aggregate analysis has previously obscured the more nuanced picture revealed by epitope profiling. Our research reconciles these conflicting hypotheses: memory antibodies can confer either protection or risk, depending on their targets and function (Garrido, 2022). Accordingly, OASiS (Original Antigenic Sin immunosurveillance) offers a novel diagnostic approach for assessing disease severity risk and predicting vaccine efficacy on a patient-by-patient basis. This work is in collaboration with Dr. Raymond Alvarez.