Behind the Study: PandaOmics Identifies Dual-Purpose Therapeutic Targets Implicated in Aging, Glioblastoma

Geoffrey Leung and Dr. Doris Leung, Senior Application Scientists from Insilico Medicine Hong Kong Ltd., detail a research paper they co-authored that was published by Aging (Aging-US) in Volume 15, Issue 8, entitled, “Identification of dual-purpose therapeutic targets implicated in aging and glioblastoma multiforme using PandaOmics – an AI-enabled biological target discovery platform.”

Listen to an audio version of this post

Behind the Study is a series of transcribed videos from researchers elaborating on their recent studies published by Aging (Aging-US). Visit the Aging (Aging-US) YouTube channel for more insights from outstanding authors.

Geoffrey Leung

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Paper Decoding series. My name is Geoffrey and I’m the Application Scientist at Insilico Medicine. With me today is Dr. Doris Leung, the Senior Biologist from the Application Science team. Our current focus is on aging research.

Hi Doris. We published a GBM paper in the journal of Aging last week. Can you tell us more about it? Is there any connection between the GBM paper and the previous Aging paper?

Doris Leung

The current research identified a dual purpose target for aging and glioblastoma. It is highly related to our previous paper. In our previous Aging paper, it identified the dual purpose target for aging and aging associated disease.

Building on this finding, our teams along with the high school students, further discover the dual purpose target for glioblastoma and both papers will demonstrate the power of PandaOmics to discover aging target and its impact on aging platform.

Geoffrey Leung

We are happy to see that the three high school students worked on the project, how their biological knowledge and research skills and PandaOmics helped them to do aging research.

Doris Leung

PandaOmics is a user-friendly, AI driven target discovery platform that requires no prior knowledge of computational biology. The current papers serve an excellent example to demonstrate that even the high school student can use the PandaOmics to discover the local targets.

Figure 1. Overall workflow of the study. 

Geoffrey Leung

How can this discovery bring benefits to the current GBM treatment?

Doris Leung

The importance of the treatment may depends on the age group. However, most of the treatments are developed without concealing the age of the patients, and they are tested on younger individuals. Therefore, it will be helpful if we can identify the recipe that we not only target aging, but also cancer.

Geoffrey Leung

So what is the next step?

Doris Leung

Our next step is to validate this dual purpose target for the treatment of glioblastoma. This will involve in vitro and in vivo studies to investigate the effect of this dual purpose target on the tumor growth and the cancer progression. Besides, the anti-aging potential will also be evaluated in animal model. Our ultimate goal is to develop effective and safe therapeutic approach to improve the clinical outcome for glioblastoma patients.

Geoffrey Leung

Can we use this AI approach to discover more dual purpose targets for other diseases?

Doris Leung

Yes, absolutely. Our approaches (are) not only used for this… for the glioblastoma… it can be applied to many different age-associated disease. For example, the metabolic disease, neurological disease, fibrotic disease, and inflammatory disease.

Geoffrey Leung

Thank you, Doris. We are excited to see more targets being discovered by PandaOmics.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Click here to read the full study published by Aging (Aging-US).

Aging (Aging-US) is an open-access journal that publishes research papers bi-monthly in all fields of aging research and other topics. These papers are available to read at no cost to readers on Aging-us.com. Open-access journals offer information that has the potential to benefit our societies from the inside out and may be shared with friends, neighbors, colleagues, and other researchers, far and wide.

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