And there’s a rich heritage from our staff and our scientific leadership in first in the field. As an example, we were the first people to discover selective blockers of a protein called Nav1.8 sodium channel protein. And for those of you who are interested in pain therapeutics and looking at that space, there’s a lot of buzz about potential opportunities for new drugs coming out of that space targeting this protein. There have been other examples where we’ve actually looked to develop technology platforms that our pharma partners are using to enable targeting unique variants of ion channels and driving SAR programs. We’re continuously expanding the platform as well. This isn’t static. We’re developing custom technologies for cell line, high-throughput electrophysiology, applications of x-ray fluorescence.
We use a lot of structural biology now cryo-EM. I’ll show you a little bit of data from that and molecular dynamics. So there’s continuous evolution on the ion channel platform to improve and drive that technology forward. It’s validated in many ways by our pharma partners. I list to here, GSK and Roche, where we have programs in neurological disease and neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases. So high-value targets with these global partners. So where is the opportunity here? And is there an opportunity? Well, there really is. I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you if there wasn’t. So they are validated the ion channel targets across the genome, whether they’re sodium channels, potassium channels, have been the rich history in neurological disease drugs, cardiovascular drugs and metabolic disease drugs that have come out of this space.
But to be fair, it’s been challenging. It’s been difficult often to obtain small molecules that actually will have all the right properties for making drugs against this target class. And we’ve been successful serving in that space of small molecules, but it’s been challenging. And I think for the industry as a whole. We believe antibodies can solve this problem, and I’ll tell you why in a moment. And we believe we have some solutions in this space that can really help advance this particular area. And specifically, OmnidAb and OmniTaur, which both Bill and Todd mentioned, we feel are very unique from our company, our position and coupling to our platform can potentially provide solutions for targeting ion channels in this space. Now this figure, I want to just go back and reference the first slide I had is, this relates to that.
Remember when I showed you the cartoon of the ion channel. What you see on the left is basically a real structure for an ion channel that we’re interested in. We generated cryo-EM structures, run molecular dynamic simulation in the computer and got structural data to help drive our programs. That’s what the red is in that slide. That’s the ion channel protein. The green is the membrane. So it’s buried in there if you look in. You can see a hole through the middle. That’s the core. And so that’s what if you want to modulate up or down, you want to get things into that. There’s almost four overleaf (phon) kind of thing around the outside where you can see domains that control the opening and closing of that core. And so that’s where we want to get.
We want to drive down into those regions to develop antibody therapeutics for targeting ion channels. Historically, though conventional formats for antibodies don’t do that. They tend to bind to flat surfaces. So if you need to get down on the membrane and access these key domains, you need something else. And that’s where the smaller sizes, Bill had mentioned and Todd had mentioned about different domains and OmnidAb and OmniTaur, give us a leg up, we feel and allow us to push forward and innovate in this space. So we’ve been working on this platform approach in the Ion channels area at OmniAb now since the company got spun out. And we’ve integrated all of these species. We have the animals support species platform that Todd has talked about.
The proprietary screening technologies that was alluded to in a number of different platforms and Bob showed you that chip, which allows us to screen at very high capacity. And then we have very sophisticated high-throughput technology and expert personnel for drug discovery in the space to look at functional readouts. So we feel we can apply this platform now in a very meaningful way for ourselves and our partners to drive ion channel drug discovery biologics, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. My final slide here is just to tease this up for the R&D community really. This is geared towards the scientific folks, but we have a webinar at the end of the month that’s describing some of our strategies and approaches in this area that’s to be presented.
