Associate Professor Shenhav Shemer from the Technion’s Faculty of Biology has joined the DREAMS team, a European Union-funded project to discover treatments for five rare neuromuscular disorders.  

DREAMS (Drug REpurposing and Artificial intelligence for Muscular disorderS) will focus on treatments for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, centronuclear myopathy, Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy, Pompe disease, and Danon disease. Approximately 400,000 people worldwide suffer from these diseases.  

“My group is engaged in various phases of the project, including the key phases of identifying biomarkers and therapeutic targets, assessing the efficacy of molecules as novel drugs to inhibit these targets and address the disease, validating these treatments in murine models, and elucidating the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the drugs’ actions,” explained Prof. Shemer.  

Prof. Shemer is a member of the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion and the Technion Integrated Cancer Center. She developed a new field of research that combines the biology of muscle and the biochemistry of the ubiquitin-proteosome system to understand the processes that precede and promote debilitating loss of muscle mass. Her goal is to develop therapies to combat muscle atrophy. 

DREAMS plans to pioneer advances in the ability to find drugs for these diseases using AI and induced pluripotent stem cells to increase the possibilities, reduce costs, decrease the time needed, and expand the range of diseases that can be treated with a single drug. The project will operate for five years with a budget of 7.7 million euros.