AI is rapidly spreading into every aspect of healthcare. Now Rubedo Life Sciences has announced that its AI platform has allowed for the development of a new drug that can treat dermatological conditions. Aging has a pretty profound impact on skin, and like the rest of the body, it can suffer from age-related inflammation. This new innovation marks an important step forward.
Current treatments for skin conditions can be divided into steroidal and non-steroidal, but the non-steroidal kind does nothing for the underlying causes of inflammation. These medications just alleviate the symptoms. The new treatment, known as RLS-1496, is still only a candidate, but it could present the first opportunity to modify the underlying condition to offer long-term relief.
It does this by targeting senescent skin cells, those that have aged to the point that they no longer function properly. These damaged and deteriorated cells cause an inflammatory immune response and, because they can’t be fixed, the reaction becomes chronic. Examples of skin conditions linked to inflammation include psoriasis and eczema.
Rubedo used its own AI platform, ALEMBIC, to carry out the research. ALEMBIC is designed to help develop new drugs, in part by identifying and targeting the cells that are responsible for ill health. That includes senescent cells in diseased skin. It can do this because it has a massive database of tissue analysis, plus various machine learning functions and other algorithms to power its work.
ALEMBIC managed to identify specific senescence signatures that indicated senescent cells in the tissue cells being analyzed. These signatures were then used to assess skin samples from real, live patients suffering from eczema, psoriasis and similar conditions. The hope is that by identifying these cells, therapies can be developed to specifically target them and alleviate the dermatological conditions they cause.
The role of inflammation in a wide range of diseases, and of age in aggravating inflammation (so-called inflammaging), has been well-documented. Rubedo isn’t the first company to investigate the role of inflammation in senescent skin cells and poor skin health, even if no one else has produced a therapy like RLS-1496. It’s an incredibly valued area of study because of the impact skin conditions can have on overall wellbeing. No one wants to live to old age in a constant state of dermatological discomfort.
It’s a good day for Rubedo, its ALEMBIC AI platform, and dermatological treatments.
