ProMIS Neurosciences, Inc. announced that it has initiated a program to develop monoclonal antibodies to treat schizophrenia and other chronic mental illnesses. Schizophrenia is a clinical term for a severely disabling neuropsychiatric disease that disrupts employment, families and communities, and likely has heterogenous biological origins. The biomedical literature has implicated protein misfolding as one cause of schizophrenia.

A candidate for a key misfolding protein in schizophrenia was first identified in a Scottish family with a neurodevelopmental syndrome including schizophrenia, such that the gene was named disrupted in schizophrenia (DISC1). DISC1, and its genetically-linked protein interactors in the brain, represent a new platform target for ProMIS, given its outstanding track record of predicting and validating misfolding-specific epitopes using proprietary computational approaches.