The TSC Alliance launched the TSC Preclinical Consortium in 2016, in collaboration with industry and academia, to test the efficacy of candidate therapeutic drugs and advance the best to the clinical stage. The Consortium started running experiments in August 2016 and have run 21 compounds to date with nine in progress and three others planned for 2019. Additionally, 10 companies have joined the Consortium since its inception. The Preclinical Consortium is a cornerstone of the TSC Alliance’s five-year Research Business Plan with a goal to have 75 mechanisms or combinations tested in the Preclinical Consortium by 2023.
On Monday, April 1 members of the TSC Preclinical Consortium met in Silver Spring, Maryland to set priorities for the Consortium for 2019 and beyond. The meeting began with presentations from the TSC Alliance as well as industry and academic partners on current experiments. Then consortium members discussed opportunities moving forward, including how to utilize technology to accelerate drug discovery, how to improve upon mTOR inhibitors both in preclinical and clinical settings, and the appropriateness of animal models and assays to begin to tackle the challenge of modeling TSC-Associated Neuropsychiatric Disorders (TAND). The meeting concluded with members setting priorities for the rest of the year.
