Technology
The ability to discover and develop best-in-class brain shuttle carriers depends entirely on the quality of the tools used to find them. NucleoTech has built a proprietary direct in vivo screening platform that solves the rate-limiting bottleneck in brain shuttle discovery, enabling a new standard of speed, precision, and scale that the industry has never had access to before.
Platform Highlights
100x Higher Throughput
More candidates screened. More ground covered. Faster.
Precise & Sensitive - Gold-Standard Accuracy
Readouts comparable to microscopy, delivered in days.
Months, Not Years - Short Iteration Cycles
Design-build-test cycles that compound with every iteration.
Developing effective brain shuttle carriers requires understanding how candidate shuttles function in a living system: whether they reach the brain, and if so, at what concentration and through which pathway. These attributes cannot be predicted in a test tube.
The problem is that the two experimental routes used today are both fundamentally inadequate. In vitro tissue-culture models fail to predict actual delivery efficiency in living systems. Conventional in vivo methods, while accurate, are prohibitively slow and expensive, testing one candidate at a time and taking months to assess each one. The result is a field that advances slowly, taking one costly step at a time, progressing in a linear and constrained fashion.
This bottleneck has kept the number of validated brain shuttle carriers small, constrained innovation to a handful of well-known targets, and left pharma with few options when they need brain delivery for their programs.
NucleoTech is built as an AI-first biotech, integrating de novo protein design directly into its shuttle discovery workflow.
How It Works
The second innovation is direct in vivo screening at scale. At the core of this capability is in vivo multiplexing, the ability to test multiple AI-designed candidate carriers simultaneously within the same living system. This is not serial testing with faster turnaround; it is true parallel screening, where multiple candidates compete under identical conditions and results are quantified with high sensitivity across a broad dynamic range.
Each experiment is completed in days, feeding into design-build-test cycles of under four weeks. This creates a tight AI-to-in vivo feedback loop: computational designs are rapidly tested in living systems, results inform the next round of AI-generated candidates, and each cycle compounds toward functionally validated, brain-penetrant carriers. This pace of iteration, impossible with conventional methods, systematically improves carrier quality over time.
Critically, the platform is not limited to a small set of well-known BBB transport pathways. NucleoTech's system enables exploration of multiple receptor-mediated transcytosis routes, opening access to transport mechanisms that the industry has largely been unable to study at scale. Factors that determine shuttle success, receptor-epitope choice, binding affinity, molecular architecture, and bispecific design, can each be interrogated systematically rather than tested by trial and error.
The challenge in brain shuttle development is that small design choices have outsized consequences. Receptor-epitope selection, binding affinity, molecular architecture, and bispecific design each determine whether a shuttle successfully traverses the barrier or becomes trapped, recycled, or degraded. These effects only emerge in living systems and cannot be predicted computationally. Current methodologies test these variables one at a time over months or years. NucleoTech’s platform enables systematic exploration of all of them in parallel.
NucleoTech’s platform is already delivering. In early screening cycles, we have identified promising proprietary carriers with performance characteristics that compare favorably against established industry benchmarks, validating both the sensitivity of our platform and the quality of our AI-designed candidate libraries.
Early Results
