Public Funding for Talisman Therapeutics Limited

"Alzheimer's disease is becoming ever more prevalent and there remains very significant unmet medical need. Currently, there are no disease-modifying therapies. High profile clinical trial failures of potential Alzheimer's therapies have led scientists to seek alternative therapeutic strategies and to question the suitability of existing research models (experimental systems used to test new medicines) in predicting outcomes in patients. One area attracting considerable attention in the scientific community is 'neuroinflammation', as links emerge between immune-related proteins and Alzheimer's disease. Neuroinflammation describes the processes of inflammation in the brain that in an acute setting may be beneficial, but when chronically active may contribute to neurodegenerative disease progression. There is therefore significant interest in the potential to target this inflammation therapeutically to slow the progression of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. Our objective is to use Innovate UK funding to develop a novel fully human _in vitro_ model of neuroinflammation that will be commercialised in collaboration with pharmaceutical and other co-development partners. The model we propose to develop will support the development of new medicines targeting this exciting area of biology. Microglia are resident cells in the brain that can mediate an immune response that contributes to neurodegeneration. We are now in a position to begin development of a model of neuroinflammation based on human neuron-microglial co-cultures to enable the complex interactions between these two cell types to be investigated. No such co-culture models have been described in the scientific literature as yet.? We will explore different combinations of co-cultures and conditions in order to generate a neuroinflammatory environment with both microglial and neurons present. We routinely work with human neuronal models of neurodegeneration as well as with microglia so are uniquely placed to successfully deliver this project."