BlackThorn licenses Yale's neuroimaging tech

Neurobehavioral disorder company BlackThorn Therapeutics Inc. (San Francisco, Calif.) exclusively licensed neuroimaging technology from Yale University School of Medicine designed to link gene expression patterns with behavioral circuits in the brain. Yale has dubbed the platform GEMINI-DOT (gene expression mapping integrated with neuroimaging for discovery of therapeutics).

A precursor to GEMINI-DOT was described in a paper published Monday in Nature Neuroscience. Led by Alan Anticevic and John Murray, Yale professors who co-developed the neuroimaging measure underlying GEMINI-DOT, the paper characterized spatial transcriptomics in the brain and found gene expression levels follow an anatomical and cognitive hierarchy within circuits in the brain. The study also found that expression of genes associated with neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease also show hierarchal variation in the cortex, suggesting the neuroimaging technology can link disease-associated genes with cortical function...