With strong ties to work undertaken at Stanford, Tosk was founded to discover and develop new drugs for genetic diseases and cancer using non-mammalian animal species as models for human diseases. These efforts evolved into a proprietary drug discovery platform that uses the common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) as a tool to discover new drugs. The company uses one application of this technology, known as OMD⢠(Optimizing Marketed Drugsâ¢) to discover adjuvants that reduce or eliminate the adverse effects of existing drugs. Toskâs current drug discovery and development efforts focus on applying the OMD⢠technology to discover cancer chemotherapeutic side-effect-reducing adjuvants. The first applications of the technology are for the widely used chemotherapeutics, methotrexate and doxorubicin. Toskâs patented OMD⢠technology uses Drosophila as a model to screen compounds for their potential to reduce or eliminate the adverse effects of existing drugs. The OMD⢠technology enables Tosk to efficiently identify side-effect-reducing compounds that would be difficult and costly to discover using traditional methods.
Tosk is also working on technology to discover drugs that block the action of cancer genes. This technology has the potential to identigy new drugs that make certain existing cancer drugs effective in patients who otherwise would not be able to benefit from the existi
