10015870Commercialising the Next Generation of Synthetic Lethality: preclinical validation of lead drug-targets and discovery platformClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UK**Background:** Gliomas are the commonest type of brain-cancer worldwide. They affect adults as well as children and cause **227,000 deaths** globally every year. Patients suffer with seizures, headaches, vomiting, blindness and personality-changes before **death follows in 95%** of high-grade cases. In addition to the terrible human cost, the burden of gliomas on the UK economy is over **£1billion/year** in NHS costs, social-care and sick-leave expenses. Today, glioma treatment involves surgery followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy. However, despite aggressive treatment, gliomas are still almost universally fatal and no new drugs have been developed in over 15 years. A major problem is that glioma tumours tend to evolve resistance to drugs and so relapses are common. **Innovation:** **CoSyne Therapeutics** is a precision-medicine company based in London. Our goal is to revolutionise the way we treat brain-cancers. We are a spin-out from Imperial College London and are building on many years of academic research in the field. The heart of our innovation is our state-of-the-art computational platform, which utilises machine-learning to find new ways to treat cancer. Our platform is able to identify genetic features in brain tumours that make them vulnerable to drugs that inhibit genes. We can then use this information to develop new drugs tailored to each individual patient's specific brain tumour. Our technology has the potential to overcome the problem of drug-resistance in gliomas and could lead to a new class of precision-drugs against brain tumours. Our technology can also be scaled to other cancers beyond gliomas, and so has the potential to generate many new drugs in the fight against cancer. **Project:** With this Innovate UK grant, we will validate our computational platform and our most promising drug-targets by showing that our technology can successfully treat brain-cancers in mice. This would be a game-changing milestone for our company and would attract considerable investment to allow us to create new drugs and progress them to clinical trials. **Our vision:** Today, patients receive non-targeted chemotherapy after they have their tumours surgically removed. We envisage a future whereby patients have their tumours genetically-sequenced after surgery to identify the exact genes present in each tumour. Precision drugs would then be selected based on the specific genetic-makeup of that tumour. Each patient would thus receive a drug tailored to the exact molecular/genetic features of their cancer. This project will therefore bring us significantly closer to realising this goal of curing cancers with precision-drugs.