Horizon Europe Project Seeks New Approaches to Rare Neuromuscular Diseases

Rare Daily Staff

Horizon Europe has launched the DREAMS consortium, a five-year project that brings together artificial intelligence, pluripotent stem cells, and cutting-edge pharmacological screening techniques to new therapeutic approaches for five rare, neuromuscular diseases.

The European Commission invested nearly $8.7 million (€8 million) into the DREAMS consortium—Drug Repurposing and Artificial intelligence for Muscular disorders. The objective is to discover treatments for five rare neuromuscular diseases: Duchenne muscular dystrophy, centronuclear myopathy, Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy, Pompe disease, and Danon disease.

The DREAMS consortium unites a highly skilled and complementary consortium of nine European partners, encompassing clinicians, patients, academic researchers, and private stakeholders. These organizations include I-Stem (France), Kantify (Belgium), The Institute of Myology (France), Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology – University of Coimbra (Portugal), The Technion -Israel Institute of Technology (Israel), Samsara Therapeutics (UK), Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris (France), AFM-Telethon (France), and Zabala Innovation (Spain).

The researchers behind DREAMS will identify promising therapies for these five genetic diseases through AI and advanced pharmacological screening. But they also plan to use AI to identify new diseases that could benefit from these treatments.

“Artificial intelligence is ushering in an era of unprecedented possibilities. Thanks to Kantify’s AI technology, we are not only aiming to predict therapeutic targets and drugs but also to identify novel therapeutic applications for our most promising treatments,” said Xavier Nissan, project coordinator and research director at I-Stem. “If successful, this project will open a new horizon of possibilities for rare disease drug discovery.”

Photo: Xavier Nissan, project coordinator and research director at I-Stem