A Growing Epidemic
Unmet needs pervade mental health disorders, which are escalating at a faster pace than our current trial-and-error approach can handle. Tens of millions of people in the US suffer from these conditions, with many more worldwide. The majority of people do not respond to the first drug prescribed, which prolongs their suffering and drives enormous medical, societal, and economic costs. Other conditions, such as PTSD, have almost no approved medications from which to even select.
A Broken System
Mental health drug development today is fundamentally flawed. Most development efforts do not adequately account for the basic fact that different people respond to the same drug in different ways. Unsurprisingly, this results in fewer transformative medicines getting to people who desperately need better options.
We Aim To Make Medicines With The Patient In Mind
Our precision approach is grounded in our ability to stratify patients with the goal of matching them to the right Alto product candidates. We have curated a large and advancing pipeline of exciting product candidates alongside tests designed to identify which patients achieve the best response. Critically, our product candidates are all clinical-stage, with extensive preclinical and clinical data suggesting the potential to bring significant improvements to patient populations not adequately treated with current standard-of-care medications.
Our Biomarker Platform
Built on more than 10 years of methods and data, using our AI-enabled platform we aim to better identify which patients are more likely to respond to our novel product candidates and drive drug development using biomarkers. We identify biomarkers similarly to how we built our pipeline – with a tight focus on core domains of mental functioning (cognition, emotion, and sleep) and their underlying brain circuits. By evaluating brain function measures like EEG and computerized tests of behavior and wearables, we stratify patients with the goal of matching them to the right Alto product candidates. Genomics further informs our understanding of drug effects at a molecular level.
Our stratification approach has already demonstrated exciting results. Alto's most advanced programs are supported by prospectively replicated evidence of clinical activity in biomarker-characterized populations.
