About Us
PsychoGenics, founded in 1999, is a privately held, rapidly growing innovative preclinical CNS service provider. PsychoGenics employees (including ~30 PhDs) have expertise in the fields of psychopharmacology, behavior, molecular biology and informatics. PsychoGenics has an established service business with more than 160 repeat pharmaceutical, biotechnology and not-for-profit, domestic and international clients. PsychoGenics offers over 80 different behavioral tests to phenotype rodent disease models and test drug candidates in the areas of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, pain and inflammation, and spinal cord and traumatic brain injury. We compliment our behavioral expertise with other capabilities including electrophysiology, molecular biology, neurogenesis, state of the art microdialysis and a variety of in-licensed transgenic mouse models.
Our expertise in preclinical neuropharmacology combined with the use of our proprietary testing platforms has enabled us to create an innovative and powerful approach to drug discovery.
Business Strategy
Services
The company provides both general and customized services to more than 160 corporate and institutional clients, including Eli Lilly and Company, CHDI, F. Hoffman-La Roche and Sunovion. Eighty-five percent of PsychoGenics' business comes from repeat clients, many signing multi-year contracts.
In addition to providing validated in vivo behavioral tests in mice and rats, the company offers additional services, which include neuromorphology, microdialysis, neurogenesis, and electrophysiology. For phenotyping, PsychoGenics utilizes PsychoScreen™, a broad battery of tests designed to systematically and objectively evaluate a range of complex and often subtle behavioral and neurological profiles.
Partnered Drug Discovery
PsychoGenics has developed proprietary, automated, high throughput behavioral testing and analytical systems that are currently the basis of partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The platforms combine robotics, computer vision, and bioinformatics to assess CNS activity of drug candidates.
Advantages of the systems include:
- Improved accuracy – elimination of subjectivity in behavioral observation
- High throughput – in vivo analysis of tens of thousands of compounds per year
- High content – measurement of over two thousand features of mouse behavior in a single session, which give rise to complex drug/disease model signatures
- Multiple indications – identification of a drug candidate's putative therapeutic application
- PK surrogate – generation of information relating to a drug candidate's onset and duration of action in vivo
- Lead optimization – incorporation of in vivo test results into medicinal chemistry efforts
- Phenotyping - detection subtle disease model phenotypes earlier than standard tests
PsychoGenics leverages its sophisticated technology platforms and broad behavioral knowledge base and capabilities to partner with pharmaceutical, biotechnology and not-for-profit research entities to screen diverse compound libraries and discover valuable new therapies for the CNS market.
