Herophilus Uses AWS-Enabled Platform to Support Neurotherapeutics Modeling and Discovery

To develop novel drugs to treat neurological diseases, researchers need an effective way to model genetic drivers of those diseases.

Herophilus is a neurotherapeutics company using cutting-edge technology to close the gap in drug availability for neurological diseases due to failure in current clinical models. As its foundation, the company uses patient-derived organoids, or living brain tissue grown from stem cells to provide a representative human in vitro model of disease. To enable preclinical drug discovery using this model, Herophilus has developed a platform that augments traditional biology with automation, machine learning, and advanced analytics in the cloud. Using the platform, “humans use the control systems to create experiments that drive the automation. The automation creates data that’s pushed to the pipeline. The pipeline executes compute environments intended to reveal deep phenotypes, which create the data that humans use to identify potential new drug targets to plan the next experiments,” says Doug Flanzer, chief technology officer at Herophilus.

As a small company that nevertheless needs access to powerful, versatile computing capability, Herophilus turns to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for compute, scale, cost management, and other solutions in the cloud. “Using AWS CloudFormation to deploy our stack has been one of the best decisions of our organization,” says Flanzer. The company also uses machine learning and advanced analytics. “These comprehensive analytics sort of drive our preclinical drug discovery from target ID to other aspects of research,” says Flanzer. And the data involved in those processes is enormous. Herophilus stores huge amounts of data including high-resolution microscopy images and high-frequency video, genomic and proteomic data, and more. Using AWS resources, Herophilus is able to keep the costs of managing this data in check.