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Understanding Taste by Studying the Protein-Protein Interactions of Taste Receptors

Understanding the underlined cellular mechanisms of human taste is an essential step for designing new food products and for improving the taste of food, nutraceutical, food supplements and even pharmaceutical products. Moreover, taste mechanisms have been evolutionary linked with protective mechanisms against hazardous compounds, thus understanding how taste works at a molecular level and its top-down effects can trigger the discovery of new therapeutic methods or identify potential novel therapeutic effects for compounds of known taste.

Fig. 1. Summary Figure of Taste Receptors and their Features. This Figure was generated by modifying figures from Pallante et al., 2021. 3D structure information is as follows: (a) Sweet: 3D molecular representation of the sweet receptor, in purple the TAS1R2 and blue the TAS1R3. The structure consists of the Venus flytrap module (VFTM) with the two lobes (LB1 and LB2), the cysteine-rich domain (CRD) and the transmembrane domain (TMD). (b) Umami: 3D molecular representation of one of the main umami receptor candidates, in green the TAS1R1 and blue the TAS1R3. The structure consists of the Venus flytrap module (VFTM) with the two lobes (LB1 and LB2), the cysteine-rich domain (CRD) and the transmembrane domain (TMD). (c) Bitter: 3D homology model of the TAS2R3 bitter receptor, (d) Salty: Representation of the 3D molecular structure of the trimeric ENaC, (e) Sour: Frontal view of the 3D molecular structure of OTOP1. Each subunit is formed by two structurally homologous domains, i.e. the N domain (light shade) and C domain (dark shade)

Taste is a multifactorial and complex procedure, involving pathways and interactions between a wide range of ligands and proteins. The first step of the taste perception process is the interplay between the chemical components of the food and a specific type of protein intracellular receptors, called taste receptors (taste receptor cells – TRCs). Taste receptors can be found in specialized cells called taste buds, organized in epithelial structures called papillae and can be found in areas like the oral mucosa and the tongue. But taste receptors can be found in other places too, for example in the outermost parts of the digestive system, i.e. larynx and upper esophagus. Sweet receptors (T1R2/T1R3) can, also, be found in the brain, heart, kidney, bladder, nasal respiratory epithelium, gut, pancreas etc., where they play an important metabolic role. What is more, taste receptors do not all belong to the same category. More specifically, sweet and umami taste receptors belong to the G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) category, while on the other hand, ion channels mediate sour and salty taste due to the presence of ions. It is, therefore, apparent that there can be a fascinating but complex network of interactions between the many different types of ligands present in the food and the different types of receptors of the human gustatory system.

Sweet and Umami tastes arise through the recognition of ligands from the GPCR type of receptors. To become more definite, sweet taste receptors are a product of the heterodimerization between TAS1R2 and TAS1R3, thus forming a GCPR that belongs to the GCPR- C family. This receptor recognizes natural sugars (e.g. glucose), artificial sweeteners (e.g. aspartame), sweet proteins (e.g. brazzein) and D-amino acids (e.g. D-Phenylalanine).  Umami taste receptors, also arise from the dimerization of two GCPRs, TAS1R1 and TAS1R3, which interact with a wide variety of chemical substances such as amino acids, dipeptide and tripeptides, nucleotide enhancers and organic acids. The TAS1R1-TAS1R3 receptors also belong to the GCPR- C family.

On the other hand, salty and bitter receptors consist of a single type of receptor. Salty taste is mediated through the ENaC receptor, which allows the intracellular passage of Na+ ions. These ions are which, in turn, initiate the perception of saltiness from the gustatory system. The taste receptor type 2 family of GPCRs (TAS2Rs) are the receptors responsible for bitter taste. They belong to the F or A class of GPCRs. Monomeric TAS2Rs (specifically TAS2R10, TAS2R14 and TAS2R46) recognize about one-third of all bitter compounds (such as Diphenidol, Lupolon, Quinine, Benzoin, Arborescin etc.), thus the need for heterodimerization may not be necessary. But in vitro experiments have demonstrated that TAS2Rs are able to form oligomers through homo- and heterodimerization, which may imply that the interactions between TAS2Rs play a role in bitter taste perception (Behrens & Meyerhof, 2018).

Sour taste perception is achieved through the OTOP1 receptor, which is essentially an H+ ion transduction channel. H+ ions are derived from acidic products, such as citric acid, tartaric acid, acetic acid, and hydrochloric acid. Along with other orthologue proteins such as OTOP2, OTOP3, etc., they form the Otopetrins family, but they don’t seem to form multimers or interact with other proteins, in order to facilitate sour perception.

It is apparent, nonetheless, that interactions among taste receptors (by forming homo- and heterodimers) and between taste receptors and other ligands (like peptides), are more than common in order to achieve taste perception, especially in the case of sweet and umami. Consequently, the study of protein-protein interactions in the context of taste receptors may be very beneficial in unravelling new mechanisms of taste perception.

This article was written by Harris Zaverdas, a Data Analyst at InSyBio. In February 2021, he graduated from the Department of Biology of the University of Patras, with a specialization in Genetics, Cell Biology and Developmental Biology. In his Bachelor’s studies, he gained wet lab experience in techniques such as PCR, Elisa, Cell Culturing (especially in neural and neural-stem cells) and more. Since September 2022, he is enrolled in the “Informatics for Life Sciences” MSc program with a specialization in Bioinformatics. During his MSc studies, he has gained skills in Data Analysis, NGS techniques and programming using R, C# and Python. Currently, he is also part of the Virtuous Horizon 2020 funded project (https://virtuoush2020.com), doing his secondment period in Politecnico di Torino.

References

Bachmanov, A., Bosak, N., Lin, C., Matsumoto, I., Ohmoto, M., Reed, D., et al. (2014). Genetics of taste receptors. Current Pharmaceutical Design, 20(16), 2669–2683. https://doi.org/10.2174/13816128113199990566

Behrens, M., & Meyerhof, W. (2013). Bitter taste receptor research comes of age: From characterization to modulation of TAS2Rs. Seminars in Cell & Developmental Biology, 24(3), 215–221. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.semcdb.2012.08.006

Bigiani, A. (2020). Does ENaC work as sodium taste receptor in humans? Nutrients, 12(4), 1195. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12041195

Chandrashekar, J., Kuhn, C., Oka, Y., Yarmolinsky, D. A., Hummler, E., Ryba, N. J. P., et al. (2010). The cells and peripheral representation of sodium taste in mice. Nature, 464(7286), 297–301. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08783

Chandrashekar, J., Mueller, K. L., Hoon, M. A., Adler, E., Feng, L., Guo, W., et al. (2000). T2Rs function as bitter taste receptors. Cell, 100(6), 703–711. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/S0092-8674(00)80706-0

Di Pizio, A., Ben Shoshan-Galeczki, Y., Hayes, J. E., & Niv, M. Y. (2019). Bitter and sweet tasting molecules: It’s complicated. Neuroscience Letters, 700, 56–63. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.neulet.2018.04.027

Kuhn, C., Bufe, B., Batram, C., & Meyerhof, W. (2010). Oligomerization of TAS2R bitter taste receptors. Chemical Senses, 35(5), 395–406. https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/bjq027

Munger, S. D., & Zufall, F. (2016). Chemosensory transduction – the detection of odors, tastes, and other chemostimuli.

Pallante, L., Malavolta, M., Grasso, G., Korfiati, A., Mavroudi, S., Mavkov, B., Deriu, M. A. (2021). On the human taste perception: Molecular-level understanding empowered by computational methods. Trends in Food Science & Technology, 116, 445–459. doi:10.1016/j.tifs.2021.07.013

Spaggiari, G., Di Pizio, A., & Cozzini, P. (2020). Sweet, umami and bitter taste receptors: State of the art of in silico molecular modeling approaches. Trends in Food Science & Technology, 96(July 2019), 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2019.12.002

T¨ole, J. C., Behrens, M., & Meyerhof, W. (2019). Taste receptor function. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-63855-7.00011-3.

Tu, Y.-H., Cooper, A. J., Teng, B., Chang, R. B., Artiga, D. J., Turner, H. N., et al. (2018). An evolutionarily conserved gene family encodes proton-selective ion channels. Science, 359(6379), 1047–1050. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao3264

Zhang, J., Jin, H., Zhang, W., Ding, C., O’Keeffe, S., Ye, M., et al. (2019a). Sour sensing from the tongue to the brain. Cell, 179(2), 392–402. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.08.031. e15.

Zhang, J., Sun Waterhouse, D., Su, G., & Zhao, M. (2019b). New insight into umami receptor, umami/umami-enhancing peptides and their derivatives: A review. Trends in Food Science & Technology, 88(April), 429–438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2019.04.008

Zhang, J., Sun Waterhouse, D., Su, G., & Zhao, M. (2019b). New insight into umami receptor, umami/umami-enhancing peptides and their derivatives: A review. Trends in Food Science & Technology, 88(April), 429–438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2019.04.008

About InSyBio: InSyBio is an international pioneer biotechnology company revolutionizing the medical field, clinical trials and food/nutrition industries through targeted biomarker discovery, highly-accurate predictive analytics and the development of personalization tests for drugs, nutraceuticals and nutrition products.

Its solutions provide the R&D departments of Pharma, Research Institutes and Food/Nutrition companies, with the means both analytically and computationally to meet their challenging research and innovation goals (such as robust biomarker discovery and accurate predictive models).  This is done through a   sophisticated, software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which comprehensively integrates multi-omics data reducing the number of samples and additional validation experiments needed. Since 2013, InSyBio has worked with hundreds of academics, large and small companies, hospitals and research centers allowing them to succeed in their biomarker discovery tasks with an increase of at least 10% in predictive accuracy and a decrease of at least 80% in overall time and cost.

Visit www.insybio.com to see how InSyBio can help you reach your R&D goals in the era of Precision Medicine and Nutrition. For more News visit our InSyBio Blog.

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InSyBio enters Loyal VC investment Stage 2 and initiates the next financing round

In April 2023, InSyBio entered the second investment stage of the Loyal VC program and will receive follow-up funding from the Toronto, Canada-based international fund with active partnerships with Founder Institute and INSEAD. This funding will be part of InSyBio’s ongoing Series A financial round of a total of 2,000,000 Euros, with Loyal VC further assisting in completing this financial round with connections to its global network of over 800 advisors and experienced entrepreneurs, accelerator leaders, advisors, angels and venture investors.

InSyBio is a member of the Loyal VC program for the past 1½ years. During this period, InSyBio i) launched and commercialized InSyBio Chronic Pain Precision Treatment Tool series, ii) improved its biodata analysis platform, InSyBio Suite, and launched InSyBio DNAseq tool and thematic platforms for Cancer, Neurodegenerative Diseases and Nutrition and iii) optimized its business development and sales processes doubling its revenues each year.

InSyBio’s CEO Labros Digonis stated: “With the help of Loyal VC we shall speed up the completion of our open financing round addressed to selected investors and accelerate commercialization of market-sought solutions:

  • Establishing InSyBio suite as the platform of choice for the discovery of biomarkers from single and multi-omics data for both Pharma and Nutrition Companies.
  • Expanding business in the nutrition sector, partnering with nutrition companies to co-develop with them InSyBio Personalization tests and personalize their own product lines.
  • Developing and putting into the market our molecular tests for personalizing therapies of osteoarthritis and brain tumors.

Loyal VC Managing Partner, Michael Kosic, stated: “Competition within our portfolio for follow-on funding is fierce and the team at InSyBio rose to the top and gained a traction stage investment from us as we started to see the results of their go-to-market strategy bear fruit. We expect the trajectory to continue and are excited by the future prospects for InSyBio.

About InSyBio: InSyBio is an international pioneer biotechnology company revolutionizing the medical field, clinical trials and food/nutrition industries through targeted biomarker discovery, highly-accurate predictive analytics and the development of personalization tests for drugs, nutraceuticals and nutrition products.

Its solutions provide the R&D departments of Pharma, Research Institutes and Food/Nutrition companies, with the means both analytically and computationally to meet their challenging research and innovation goals (such as robust biomarker discovery and accurate predictive models).  This is done through a   sophisticated, software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which comprehensively integrates multi-omics data reducing the number of samples and additional validation experiments needed. Since 2013, InSyBio has worked with hundreds of academics, large and small companies, hospitals and research centers allowing them to succeed in their biomarker discovery tasks with an increase of at least 10% in predictive accuracy and a decrease of at least 80% in overall time and cost.

Visit www.insybio.com to see how InSyBio can help you reach your R&D goals in the era of Precision Medicine and Nutrition. For more News visit our InSyBio Blog.

About Loyal VC: Loyal VC operates a global startup index fund with over 300 investments across more than 50 countries. The fund is designed to minimize systemic bias inherent in the investment process, unlocking greater returns.  The Loyal Startup Index Fund has delivered strong returns since its launch in 2018, thanks to its collaborative, staged investment process, its network of over 800 advisors, and its global relationships with the Founder Institute, the world’s largest pre-seed accelerator, and INSEAD, rated the #1 non-US business school for unicorn founders by Pitchbook.  Loyal’s global start-up index fund is inclusive of a diverse, often mission-driven, group of entrepreneurs. To date over 30% of the portfolio have a woman CEO, almost 30% are from emerging markets, and around 80% address one or more of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs). 

For more information visit www.loyal.vc

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InSyBio facilitates food design through an interpretable Umami taste predictor

InSyBio, through its participation in the Virtuous Project together with a prestigious team of researchers and industry players, has recently contributed to the implementation of the Virtuous Umami tool, a tool which can accurately predict the umami taste. This machine learning-based tool was tested against five databases related to foods or natural compounds and demonstrated an unprecedented accuracy, while also identifying a set of features which are representative of the Umami taste.

The technology for this tool was published (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25935-3) in the Scientific Reports journal of the Springer Nature publishing company, while the corresponding web tool is publicly available (http://195.251.58.251:19009/#/virtuous-umami).

The umami taste is the one of the five basic taste modalities that has been associated with a pleasant taste in food. The implementation of fast and cost-effective tools to predict the umami taste of a molecule presents an interesting challenge: how to facilitate the effective rationalisation of the production and consumption of specific foods and ingredients. More details about computational taste prediction and the molecular understanding of human taste can be found in our latest survey articles: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924224421004519 and https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00217-022-04044-5

The vision of the Virtuous project, as previously stated by Dr. Marco Agostino Deriu, is to “build an intelligent machine able to decrypt a sensation by modelling the biophysical architecture of our bodycovering all required competences for this ambitious challenge, starting from molecular and multiscale modelling techniques, to artificial intelligence algorithms; experimental facilities to analyze natural product typical of the Mediterranean diet such as wine and oil

Labros Digonis, CEO of InSyBio, commented saying: “The implementation of Umami Taste is a significant milestone for InSyBio. It is a materialization of our precision nutrition vision and a great case study of how the use of our technology provides a deep insight into and facilitates the design of new food products.. Within the context of the Virtuous project, we will continue working to generate a cost-efficient and accurate computational infrastructure and set of tools to facilitate a more targeted food product design and the understanding of human taste“.

About Virtuous: The EU-funded VIRTUOUS project (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) – https://virtuoush2020.com/) is dedicated to the development of a virtual tongue made by an integrated computational framework that can screen food for natural components by binding taste receptors. This international consortium includes eight academic and industry participants from four European countries. Using a variety of computational and experimental data, partners plan to create an algorithm for the prediction of the organoleptic profile of the food based on its chemical composition. The potential application of this platform as a taste predictor is in the food industry, modern precision agriculture, and as a link to neuroscience for taste determination.

About InSyBio: InSyBio is an international pioneer bioinformatics revolutionizing the medical field, clinical trials and food/nutrition industries through targeted biomarker discovery and highly-accurate predictive analytics.

Its solutions provide the R&D departments of Pharma, Research Institutes and Food/Nutrition companies, with the means both analytically and computationally, to meet their challenging research and innovation goals (such as robust biomarker discovery and accurate predictive models). This is done through a sophisticated, software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which comprehensively integrates multi-omics data reducing the number of samples and additional validation experiments needed. Since 2013, InSyBio has worked with hundreds of academics, large and small companies, hospitals and research centers allowing them to succeed in their biomarker discovery tasks with an increase of at least 10% in predictive accuracy and decrease of at least 80% in overall time and cost.

Visit www.insybio.com to see how InSyBio can help you reach your R&D goals in the era of Precision Medicine and Nutrition.

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A new tool for processing single cell RNA-sequencing data

Single-cell RNA-sequencing is a genomic approach for the detection and quantitative analysis of RNA molecules in biological samples and has been extremely successful in the past few years in studying the cell-composition of biological samples, exploring cell proliferation and cell migration mechanisms and providing another layer of information in addition to bulk-RNA sequencing technologies.The new version of InSyBio Suite includes a new functionality in the InSyBio ncRNAseq tool for streamlining and optimizing the processing of single cell RNA-sequencing data.

  • The pioneer InSyBio ncRNAseq tool allows performing the analysis from raw data simplifying the process and allowing it to be run by non-bioinformatics experts.
  • In addition to the standard preprocessing steps, InSyBio ncRNASeq provides tools for statistical analysis of the data, clustering and cluster annotation using an unbiased approach. Moreover, it is inteconnected with other tools of InSyBio Suite allowing for the interpretation and meta-analysis of the results.
  • It also provides all the required data visualization steps allowing for the generation of ridge-plots, dot-plots, feature-plots, UMAP and PCA plots.
  • This tool provides an automatically generated documentation describing all the steps of the analysis, methods and parameters used so that it can be used as is for scientific publications.

The Product Development Manager of InSyBio, Aigli Korfiati, stated that “During the past year, we have received a substantial ammount of requests for processing such data in Cancer, Cardiovascular and Neurodegenerative diseases applications. The analysis of scRNAseq data with existing tools is far from being standardized and there are many common mistakes made by inexperienced users. With the expansion of InSyBio ncRNAseq tool with the new functionality of processing scRNAseq data, we reassure that users will perform unbiased and optimized prosessing of their data and get the most out of them with high-quality figures and documentation that can be used as is for high impact scientific publications”.

Read more details about this tool in the updated InSyBio ncRNAseq’s user manual: 

InSyBio is offering a one-month free license to use InSyBio Suite including the new version of InSyBio ncRNAseq tool. Request your free trial now by completing a simple form at: https://insybio.com/get-a-free-one-month-license-of-insybio-suite/

About InSyBio: InSyBio is an international pioneer bioinformatics revolutionizing the medical field, clinical trials and food/nutrition industries through targeted biomarker discovery and highly-accurate predictive analytics.

Its solutions provide the R&D departments of Pharma, Research Institutes and Food/Nutrition companies, with the means both analytically and computationally to meet their challenging research and innovation goals (such as robust biomarker discovery and accurate predictive models). This is done through a sophisticated, software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which comprehensively integrates multi-omics data reducing the number of samples and additional validation experiments needed. Since 2013, InSyBio has worked with hundreds of academics, large and small companies, hospitals and research centers allowing them to succeed in their biomarker discovery tasks with an increase of at least 10% in predictive accuracy and decrease of at least 80% in overall time and cost.

Visit www.insybio.com to see how InSyBio can help you reach your R&D goals in the era of Precision Medicine and Nutrition.

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Mass Spectrometry Proteomics Data : From raw data to discovery

October 7, 2021 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM EEST)

Introduction to experimental and computational mass spectrometry proteomics pipelines for biomecial application and discovery of biomarkers.

Mass spectrometry-based proteomics is a strong tool for the proteome of biosamples and has numerous applications for the discovery of diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic biomarkers. However, there exist several different complementary mass spectrometry based techniques (e.g. labelled vs label free discovery proteomics, DIA and DDA analysis, targeted vs untargeted) which makes the identification of the most suitable pipeline for each biomedical problem a difficult task. Moreover, raw data generated by the mass spectrometries requires, complex preprocessing and processing to transform them into meaningful results and this analysis requires the combination of commercial and open source tools and repositories.

In this webinar, the attendees were introduced to modern mass spectrometry based proteomics pipelines, and they were taught to critically evaluate is more suitable for each problem. Moreover, the attendees were introduced to a set of computational tools, platofrms and pipelines required to transform raw proteomics data to biomedicine knowledge. Finally, an introduction was given to a novel computational technique for preprocessing proteomics data in an attempt to minimize missing values and maximize the number of quantified proteins and peptides per dataset.

The webinar was delivered by Dr. Konstantinos Theofilatos, Chief Technology Officer at InSyBio.

Konstantinos Theofilatos is a computer engineer with MSc and PhD in Bioinformatics from University of Patras (Greece). He is a highly experienced bioinformatician and programmer. The last 15 years, he has worked as a researcher, software engineer and bioinformatician in several Developmental and Research projects. Also, he has worked as a teaching collaborator in the Technological Institutes of Messologhi, Argostoli and Naupaktos, Greece, while at the moment he is a Lecturer in Bioinformatics in King’s College London. His main R&D activity is related with bioinformatics applications and his research interests include computational intelligence, bioinformatics, data mining, web technologies and time series forecasting. So far, he has published more than 45 articles in international scientific journals and more than 50 articles in conference proceedings, 2 edited volumes-books, 4 book chapters while he is the co-inventor in two submitted patents in US Patent office and has an h-index of 15. He is the co-founder and CTO of InSyBio Ltd, a biotechnology and bioinformatics company which delivers a cloud-based software suite for intelligent analysis of biological data and biomarkers discovery.

About InSyBio: InSyBio is an international pioneer bioinformatics revolutionizing the medical field, clinical trials and food/nutrition industries through targeted biomarker discovery and highly-accurate predictive analytics.

Its solutions provide the R&D departments of Pharma, Research Institutes and Food/Nutrition companies, with the means both analytically and computationally to meet their challenging research and innovation goals (such as robust biomarker discovery and accurate predictive models). This is done through a sophisticated, software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which comprehensively integrates multi-omics data reducing the number of samples and additional validation experiments needed. Since 2013, InSyBio has worked with hundreds of academics, large and small companies, hospitals and research centers allowing them to succeed in their biomarker discovery tasks with an increase of at least 10% in predictive accuracy and decrease of at least 80% in overall time and cost.

Visit www.insybio.com to see how InSyBio can help you reach your R&D goals in the era of Precision Medicine and Nutrition.

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Optimized and automatized biomarker discovery and processing of biomedical data with InSyBio Pipelines

The new version of InSyBio Suite includes InSyBio Pipelines, a new tool for automatizing and optimizing the computational process for identifying biomarkers.

  • The pioneer InSyBio Pipelines tool allows performing the analysis from raw data until the final biomarkers and predictive models are found in one step simplifying the process and allowing it to be executed by non-machine learning or bioinformatics experts.
  • It also provides optimized sets of parameters and algorithms selected for all steps of the analysis alleviating the pain of the user to optimize them.
  • In an attempt to optimize performance and minimizes biases from manual tuning of parameter and algorithm selection we provide optimized sets of parameters and analysis pipelines for specific application domains: Cancer, Neurodegenerative Diseases and Nutrition. These optimized parameters have been inferred by applying InSyBio’s proprietary multi-objective optimization methodology to optimize the omics analysis and biomarker discovery pipelines maximizing their performance in golden standard datasets. For more details on this methodology refer to InSyBio’s patent application: Theofilatos, K., Alexakos, C., Korfiati, A., Dimitrakopoulos, C., & Mavroudi, S. (2018). U.S. Patent Application No. 15/837,407.
  • Among other improvements, this new version of InSyBio Suite, allows the use of deep learning methods for building machine-learning based diagnostic and prognostic models with the identified biomarkers.

The CEO of InSyBio, Labros Digonis, stated that “This new version of InSyBio Suite overcomes some major limitations of biomedical big data analytics and biomarker discovery and opens the road to establish it as the analysis platform of choice, ‘the SAP’ for Pharma and Nutrition Industries’ R&D. Reproducibility of biomarker discovery is now not a big issue while biomarker discovery and omics data analysis can now be done in a transparent and optimized way differently for the various application domains: Cancer, Neurodegenerative Diseases and Nutrition”.

InSyBio is offering a one-month free license to use InSyBio Suite including the new version of InSyBio Pipelines tool. Request your free trial now by completing a simple form at: https://www.insybio.com/request.html

About InSyBio: InSyBio is an international pioneer bioinformatics revolutionizing the medical field, clinical trials and food/nutrition industries through targeted biomarker discovery and highly-accurate predictive analytics.

Its solutions provide the R&D departments of Pharma, Research Institutes and Food/Nutrition companies, with the means both analytically and computationally to meet their challenging research and innovation goals (such as robust biomarker discovery and accurate predictive models). This is done through a sophisticated, software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which comprehensively integrates multi-omics data reducing the number of samples and additional validation experiments needed. Since 2013, InSyBio has worked with hundreds of academics, large and small companies, hospitals and research centers allowing them to succeed in their biomarker discovery tasks with an increase of at least 10% in predictive accuracy and decrease of at least 80% in overall time and cost.

Visit www.insybio.com to see how InSyBio can help you reach your R&D goals in the era of Precision Medicine and Nutrition.

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Personalizing the treatment of Chronic Pain Patients using the Salonpas® Pain Relieving Patch and Interpretable Artificial Intelligence

Traditionally, prescribed opioid analgesics for treating Chronic Pain can become harmful for the patients and negatively affect their lives. In the meantime, the Chronic Pain condition is affecting the lives of millions of patients deteriorating their ability to perform everyday tasks, diminishing their performance in their work environment and, in general, reducing their satisfaction of life. InSyBio and Clarity Science LLC, capitalizing on their established collaboration, deployed an interpretable artificial intelligence approach to personalize the application of an alternative Chronic Pain treatment based on the Salonpas® Pain Relieving Patch and evaluated their results on a cohort of 186 pain patients. The main findings of this work include:

  • Machine learning models for the prediction of changes in total BPI Severity scores, total BPI Interference scores, and changes in the total drugs after Salonpas® Pain Relieving Patch treatment were developed with accuracy and correlation exceeding 90% and 0.4, respectively
  • Clearly defined groups of responders and non-responders to this topical analgesic treatment were identified: e.g. The Salonpas® Pain Relieving Patch seems to provide maximal benefits in patients who take high number of anti-inflammatory drugs, use Voltaren®, have pain in the lower extremities, do little or no heavy physical exercise, and have problems with their sleep.
  • Using the identified prediction models on another pain study (OPERA study, 688 participants) it was found that 62.3% of the responders of other topical analgesics treatments would show additional improvement using the Salonpas Patch.

Peter Hurwitz, President of Clarity Science states: “Being able to incorporate predictive analytics to the treatment decision process, using an artificial intelligence platform like Insybio’s, should allow clinicians and patients to choose, with greater accuracy, personalized and effective treatments that will achieve positive outcomes without needing to trial a medication. This will ultimately lead to a simpler treatment pathway across disciplines that improves patient care through focused prescribing, reduces cost, and limits unnecessary adverse events.”

This work will be presented at PAINWeek 2021, the National Conference on Pain for Frontline Practitioners, September 7-11, 2021, Las Vegas, USA. Stay tuned with our newsletter to be among the first who will get access to the web tool that will allow the personalization of Chronic Pain treatment with the Salonpas Pain Relieving Patch that will be launched in July 2021.

Read more details on this study in our recent publication:

Gudin J, Mavroudi S, Korfiati A., Dietze, D., & Hurwitz, P. H Personalized Pain Therapy: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Utilized to Predict Patient Response to OTC Topical Analgesics. Anesth Pain Res. 2021; 5 (1): 1-11. Correspondence: Peter Hurwitz, Clarity Science LLC.;750. (https://scivisionpub.com/pdfs/personalized-pain-therapy-artificial-intelligence-ai-utilized-to-predict-patient-response-to-otc-topical-analgesics-1651.pdf)

About InSyBio: InSyBio is an international pioneer bioinformatics revolutionizing the medical field, clinical trials and food/nutrition industries through targeted biomarker discovery and highly-accurate predictive analytics.

Its solutions provide the R&D departments of Pharma, Research Institutes and Food/Nutrition companies, with the means both analytically and computationally to meet their challenging research and innovation goals (such as robust biomarker discovery and accurate predictive models). This is done through a sophisticated, software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which comprehensively integrates multi-omics data reducing the number of samples and additional validation experiments needed. Since 2013, InSyBio has worked with hundreds of academics, large and small companies, hospitals and research centers allowing them to succeed in their biomarker discovery tasks with an increase of at least 10% in predictive accuracy and decrease of at least 80% in overall time and cost.

Visit www.insybio.com to see how InSyBio can help you reach your R&D goals in the era of Precision Medicine and Nutrition.

About Clarity Science LLC: Clarity Science is an international scientific outcomes research Company assisting biopharmaceutical, specialty pharmacies, and other healthcare Companies with the coordination and execution of scientific, IRB-approved, outcomes studies. Managed by a seasoned staff of healthcare professionals, scientific researchers, outcomes statisticians, and guided by physician experts across multiple therapeutic areas, Clarity Science currently coordinates and administers outcomes studies in pain, allergy, podiatry, scar/wound healing, cardio-metabolic, psychiatry, urology, and genomic testing fields. Whether through improving treatment methodologies or identifying new ones, Clarity aspires to make a global positive impact on patient health and to improve the quality of life for patients and their families. Our goal is to conduct scientifically rigorous and valid research that advances innovation in science and ultimately helps healthcare professionals provide improved patient care, leading to improved patient health worldwide ( www.claritysciences.org )

For any further detail contact our Business Development Manager, Mackenzie Hastings, at m.hastings@insybio.com.

For more News visit our InSyBio Blog.

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InSyBio joins Loyal VC program and receives initial investment

InSyBio has joined the Loyal VC program which includes an initial investment from the Toronto, Canada based international fund and provides InSyBio with access to Loyal VC’s global network of over 400 advisors and experienced entrepreneurs, accelerator leaders, advisors, angels and venture investors.

InSyBio will benefit from active business development support and guidance as well as having access to various valuable resources and services as part of the Loyal VC program.

InSyBio’s CEO Labros Digonis stated: “with the Loyal VC program we shall speed up the completion of our open financing round and accelerate the accomplishment of both our business and technological targets, most important of which are:

  • The launching and commercialization of the InSyBio Precision Chronic Pain Treatment Tool
  • To continue improving the InSyBio Suite by incorporating our clients’ feedback and by integrating additional tools in it like Thematic platforms for Cancer, Neurodegenerative Diseases and Nutrition
  • And eventually to evolve at such a level where the InSyBio suite will be the platform of choice for the discovery of biomarkers from single and multi-omics data.” And finally he added “between Insybio and Loyal VC it surely begins an encouraging win-win situation”

About InSyBio: InSyBio is an international pioneer bioinformatics revolutionizing the medical field, clinical trials and food/nutrition industries through targeted biomarker discovery and highly-accurate predictive analytics.

Its solutions provide the R&D departments of Pharma, Research Institutes and Food/Nutrition companies, with the means both analytically and computationally to meet their challenging research and innovation goals (such as robust biomarker discovery and accurate predictive models). This is done through a sophisticated, software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which comprehensively integrates multi-omics data reducing the number of samples and additional validation experiments needed. Since 2013, InSyBio has worked with hundreds of academics, large and small companies, hospitals and research centers allowing them to succeed in their biomarker discovery tasks with an increase of at least 10% in predictive accuracy and decrease of at least 80% in overall time and cost.

Visit www.insybio.com to see how InSyBio can help you reach your R&D goals in the era of Precision Medicine and Nutrition.

About Loyal VC: Loyal VC operates a global startup index fund with over 160 investments across more than 38 countries. The fund is designed to minimize systemic bias inherent in the investment process, unlocking greater returns. The Loyal Startup Index Fund has delivered strong returns since its launch in 2018, thanks to its collaborative, staged investment process, its network of over 400 advisors, and its global relationships with the Founder Institute, the world’s largest pre-seed accelerator, and INSEAD, rated the #1 non-US business school for unicorn founders by Pitchbook. Loyal’s global start-up index fund is inclusive of a diverse, often mission-driven, group of entrepreneurs. To date over 30% of the portfolio have a woman CEO, almost 30% are from emerging markets, and around 80% address one or more of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs).

For more information visit www.loyal.vc.

For more News visit our InSyBio Blog.

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Precision Chronic Pain Treatment Tool: a first-of-its-kind tool for personalizing treatment of Chronic Pain Patients

In an effort to find a better alternative to the traditionally prescribed opioid analgesics, InSyBio worked in collaboration with Clarity Science LLC and developed a machine learning-based tool for predicting the response of chronic pain patients to 4 different non-opioid pain treatment formulations. This tool is capitalizing on InSyBio’s unique machine learning technology to develop machine learning models that are able to predict various response to treatment metrics (including pain severity and interference scales as well as reduction of total drugs) with an unprecedented accuracy. The accuracy of these models in predicting the changes in the response to treatment metrics exceeded 82% for all metrics in a cohort of more than 600 patients while 98.1% of the participants which were classified as responders to non-opioid treatments presented substantial improvement in all metrics in a follow-up after 3-6 months from baseline.

The Precision Chronic Pain Treatment Tool is a first-of-its-kind tool that is able to stratify chronic pain patients into individuals who will benefit from topical analgesics treatment and select the most suitable non-opioid treatment formulation for them using as input a combination of demographics, clinical characteristics and other responses to a simple questionnaire.

The first version of this tool is available for a free trial usage by clinicians treating Chronic pain patients (get it from here ) offering them the following features:

  • Evaluation of chronic pain situation of patients through the completion of a user-friendly web form
  • Monitoring the progress of chronic pain patients over the time (trends, graphical representation of their clinical and demographics characteristics etc.)
  • Suggesting suitable patients for non-opioid treatments
  • Suggesting the best performing non-opioid treatment among 4 different formulations.

A simpler version of this tool is available for chronic-pain patients (get it from here) to allow them to identify if a non-opioid treatment is suitable for them and suggest them discussing additional therapeutic options with their physician.

In the next few months this tool will be expanded with additional non-opioid formulations and treatments (such as pain patches), with more specialized versions for specific chronic pain etiologies, such as Osteoarthritis and Rheumatoid Arthritis, and incorporating biomarkers to improve the predictive accuracy of the utilized prognostic models.

Peter Hurwitz, President of Clarity Science states: “Through their predictive analytic and artificial intelligence algorithms, the team at InSyBio has developed a simple and unique tool that will allow patients and clinicians the ability to identify suitable treatments, and more importantly, treatments that will predict the likelihood of response prior to the patient beginning that treatment. Identifying treatments that may generate a positive outcome prior to prescribing is very exciting as it will cut down on unnecessary treatment trials, adverse events and side effects, time for a patient to feel relief, and cost, just to name a few advantages. With so many treatment options available, anything that may help in identifying the best approach upfront will be welcomed by the healthcare community and patients.”

Seferina Mavroudi, Chief Scientific Officer of InSyBio states: “Our tool is based on a Sophisticated, Interpretable Machine Learning approach to provide health care providers with a high accuracy yet trustable and transparent decision aid. Leveraging the power of AI in this way, I think we have arrived at the future of medical decision making.”

Aigli Korfiati, product development manager of InSyBio states: “Years of teamwork in building sophisticated ΑΙ have now met a huge medical need. Identifying the most beneficial treatment for each chronic pain patient is now possible and straightforward. You answer the questions in our web tool and simultaneously you get the results! Our product development team worked hard towards this goal achieving to optimize the user experience of both clinicians and patients.”

Read more details on the data used for the development of this tool in our recent publication:

  • Gudin, J., Mavroudi, S., Korfiati, A., Theofilatos, K., Dietze, D., & Hurwitz, P. (2020). Reducing opioid prescriptions by identifying responders on topical analgesic treatment using an individualized medicine and predictive analytics approach. Journal of pain research, 13, 1255.

About InSyBio: InSyBio is an international pioneer in bioinformatics revolutionizing the medical field, clinical trials and food/nutrition industries through targeted biomarker discovery and highly-accurate predictive analytics.

Its solutions provide the R&D departments of Pharma, Research Institutes and Food/Nutrition companies, with the means both analytically and computationally to meet their challenging research and innovation goals (such as robust biomarker discovery and accurate predictive models). This is done through a sophisticated, software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which comprehensively integrates multi-omics data reducing the number of samples and additional validation experiments needed. Since 2013, InSyBio has worked with hundreds of academics, large and small companies, hospitals and research centers allowing them to succeed in their biomarker discovery tasks with an increase of at least 10% in predictive accuracy and decrease of at least 80% in overall time and cost.

Visit www.insybio.com to see how InSyBio can help you reach your R&D goals in the era of Precision Medicine and Nutrition.

About Clarity Science LLC: Clarity Science is an international scientific outcomes research Company assisting biopharmaceutical, specialty pharmacies, and other healthcare Companies with the coordination and execution of scientific, IRB-approved, outcomes studies. Managed by a seasoned staff of healthcare professionals, scientific researchers, outcomes statisticians, and guided by physician experts across multiple therapeutic areas, Clarity Science currently coordinates and administers outcomes studies in pain, allergy, podiatry, scar/wound healing, cardio-metabolic, psychiatry, urology, and genomic testing fields. Whether through improving treatment methodologies or identifying new ones, Clarity aspires to make a global positive impact on patient health and to improve the quality of life for patients and their families. Our goal is to conduct scientifically rigorous and valid research that advances innovation in science and ultimately helps healthcare professionals provide improved patient care, leading to improved patient health worldwide ( www.claritysciences.org ).

For any further detail contact our Business Development Manager, Mackenzie Hastings, at m.hastings@insybio.com.

For more News visit our InSyBio Blog.

InSyBio DNA-seq has been launched allowing the discovery of genomic variants and their integration with other omics biomarkers

A new tool has been integrated in InSyBio Suite (InSyBio DNA-seq) which enables the fast and accurate pre-processing and analysis of DNA-sequencing data by non-bioinformatics experts with optimized pipelines. This tool includes the following functionalities:

  • Pre-processing of DNA-sequencing data with optimized pipelines and a user-friendly interface
  • Population analysis of genetics data for the identification of significant genomics biomarkers
  • Integration of genomic biomarkers with InSyBio Suite’s knowledge base to allow the biological interpretation of your data
  • Integration of genomic biomarkers with other omics biomarkers and clinical data using statistical and machine learning functionalities of InSyBio Biomarkers.

InSyBio’s CEO, Labros Digonis, stated that“Genomics is the area contributing more than 70% of the biomarkers used in clinical practice nowadays, being able to capture among other the predisposition for the development of complex diseases such as cancers and neurodegenerative diseases.
Considering the feedback of our users, we have now incorporated in InSyBio Suite a tool that allows non-bioinformatics experts to analyze their genomics data, identify, validate and interpret genomic biomarkers from them without the need of dedicated computing infrastructures.”

InSyBio is offering a free, one-month license to use InSyBio Suite’s all new tools and functionalities. Request your free trial now by completing a simple form at: https://www.insybio.com/request.html .

About InSyBio: InSyBio is an international pioneer bioinformatics revolutionizing the medical field, clinical trials and food/nutrition industries through targeted biomarker discovery and highly-accurate predictive analytics.

Its solutions provide the R&D departments of Pharma, Research Institutes and Food/Nutrition companies, with the means both analytically and computationally to meet their challenging research and innovation goals (such as robust biomarker discovery and accurate predictive models). This is done through a sophisticated, software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which comprehensively integrates multi-omics data reducing the number of samples and additional validation experiments needed. Since 2013, InSyBio has worked with hundreds of academics, large and small companies, hospitals and research centers allowing them to succeed in their biomarker discovery tasks with an increase of at least 10% in predictive accuracy and decrease of at least 80% in overall time and cost.

Visit www.insybio.com to see how InSyBio can help you reach your R&D goals in the era of Precision Medicine and Nutrition.

For more News visit our InSyBio Blog.

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