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 Make Medicines With The Patient In Mind
Our precision approach is grounded in our ability to match each Alto medicine with the right patients. We have built a large and rapidly advancing pipeline of exciting drugs alongside tests that identify which patients achieve the best response. Critically, our drug candidates are all clinical-stage, meaning that we will soon know what works and for whom. Our initial clinical studies focus on depression and PTSD, but our pipeline and biomarker platform are designed to scale broadly across mental health conditions, and to neurology.
Our Biomarker Platform
Built on 10 years of methods and data, our AI-enabled platform identifies responsive patients and drives 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 and match patients with the right Alto drugs. Genomics further informs our understanding of drug effects at a molecular level.
Our stratification approach has already demonstrated exciting results. Alto's field-leading AI-based biomarkers have identified which patients with depression or PTSD best respond to a range of current treatments and have uncovered subtypes of disease not evident using traditional clinical tools alone. These findings have been validated through multiple publications in top-tier peer-reviewed scientific journals.
