Landmark study in cell introduces first-of-its-kind optogenetic screening platform for drug discovery

(Press-News.org) REDWOOD CITY, CA — July 14, 2025 — A landmark study published in Cell has unveiled a first-of-a-kind optogenetic screening platform, developed by scientists at Integrated Biosciences, a biotechnology company integrating optogenetics, chemistry and AI to discover small molecule therapeutics for age-related diseases. The new peer-reviewed publication demonstrates the platform’s capabilities by applying it to the integrated stress response (ISR), a key aging- and disease-associated signaling pathway implicated in neurodegeneration, cancer and viral infection.

 

In the Cell study, Integrated Biosciences scientists used optogenetic control to selectively activate the ISR, leading to the discovery of several ISR-potentiating compounds that sensitize stressed cells to apoptosis without inducing cytotoxicity across diverse cell types and stressors — an elusive therapeutic profile not achievable with traditional ISR drugs in development. The lead compounds identified in the study showed broad-spectrum antiviral activity in vitro, and one compound significantly reduced disease pathology and viral titers in a mouse model of ocular herpesvirus infection.

 

The versatile platform that is featured in the study allows for precise and dynamic control of biological targets and processes, unlocking a powerful new approach to drug discovery. By integrating programmable, light-responsive domains with automated high-throughput screens, the platform interrogates biological systems with millisecond temporal precision and micron-scale spatial resolution. This uniquely modular system allows researchers to resolve compound effects in real time, across diverse targets, cell types, and disease-relevant contexts, providing a level of precision and control not achievable with conventional screening technologies.

 

“Synthetic biology tools like optogenetics allow us to precisely tune complex cellular processes, something traditional drug screening cannot do,” said Maxwell Wilson, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Integrated Biosciences. “Our platform lets us activate specific targets and pathways with light, generating clean, interpretable readouts and the discovery of high-precision compounds, often with unprecedented mechanisms of action, that were previously inaccessible.”

 

Unlike traditional perturbation agents and pharmacological tools, the platform enables selective, pathway-specific activation without the off-target or systemic confounding effects, generating clean, high-fidelity, on-pathway datasets. This is especially critical in phenotypic screening and AI-driven discovery where data quality remains a major bottleneck to extracting meaningful insights.

 

“This work by the team at Integrated Biosciences is a powerful demonstration of how synthetic biology can reshape therapeutic discovery,” said James J. Collins, Ph.D., Scientific Co-Founder and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board at Integrated Biosciences, and Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. “Using this novel platform, Integrated Biosciences can now interrogate disease-relevant biology and systematically explore chemical space with a level of nuance and specificity that was previously out of reach.”

 

Beyond the ISR, Integrated Biosciences’ optogenetic platform offers a generalizable strategy for discovering small molecules that modulate complex, traditionally hard-to-drug targets and pathways, including those central to aging. Because the system is modular and tunable, it can be rapidly adapted to explore a wide range of biological processes with on-pathway, on-phenotype precision — a major advantage over traditional screening tools. 

 

“This is only the first demonstration of what our optogenetic platform can do,” said Wilson. “Synthetic biology gives us the control we need to build more accurate, disease-relevant discovery systems. Our goal is to bring this level of precision to other pathways where conventional tools have failed.”

 

This work further strengthens the company’s AI-driven discovery engine, which leverages graph neural networks — an architecture the team helped pioneer through foundational studies published in Nature, Nature Aging and Nature Protocols. Together, these advances position Integrated Biosciences at the forefront of a new era in drug discovery, where high-fidelity data and sophisticated computational modeling converge to unlock previously inaccessible therapeutic opportunities.

 

About Integrated Biosciences

 

Integrated Biosciences is a biotechnology company advancing small molecule therapeutics for age-related diseases by unravelling complex biology with optogenetics, chemistry, and AI. To contact Integrated Biosciences, go to: https://www.integratedbiosciences.com/  

 

END