by Giorgia Gugliemi
Swiss biotech Stalicla hopes to bring precision medicine to autism. Experts praise efforts to identify autism subgroups, but evidence to support the company’s claims has yet to be seen.
Five years ago, Lynn Durham founded a biotech startup — called Stalicla — that aims to do what nobody has achieved so far: tailor pharmacological therapies to idiopathic autism subgroups, or those who have autism with no known genetic cause. To date, the company, which is based in Switzerland, has secured 29 million Swiss francs ($30 million) and developed a machine-learning platform that sorts autistic people into different groups based on shared biological ‘signatures’ and then identifies drugs that it hopes will reverse such signatures. read more