Discovery

Discovery Process

Drug Discovery Platform: Network Pharmacology Algorithms & High Throughput Screens

Over the past five years, GBS Global has been working to discover which combinations of cannabis-based compounds would be therapeutically useful for the treatment of specific diseases within the following defined disease categories:

  • neurodegenerative disorders,
  • inflammatory disorders,
  • cardiovascular disorders,
  • chronic & neuropathic pain,
  • metabolic syndrome,
  • HIV/AIDS adjunctive therapies,
  • HIV-associated Neurocognitive Disorder (HAND),
  • wound healing, and
  • triple-negative breast cancer

Our drug discovery process combines: 1) high throughput screening of tens of thousands of combinations of compounds derived from specific chemovars of the cannabis plant in well-established cellular models of diseases and 2) a proprietary network pharmacology algorithm for the prediction of complex therapeutic mixtures that we spent two-and-a-half-year training and testing against our cell assay data. This combined approach to drug discovery increases our research efficiency and accuracy.

Screening of cannabis-based mixtures for drug discovery involves the testing of specific combinations of plant chemicals from many naturally occurring cannabis chemovars and the use of live models for these diseases that have been well established by other researchers. First, we find chemovars that show some therapeutic activity, and then we refine these natural mixtures to optimize their effectiveness in cellular assays by removing compounds that do not act synergistically with the others in the mixtures. We also use the GBS Network Pharmacology Platform to prioritize and eliminate some potential combinations; now that the GBS Network Pharmacology Platform has been internally validated.