Hide & Seek's research program focuses on developing innovative therapies to treat Lysosomal Disease within a discreet time frame.   Towards that end, we have created a unique paradigm for pre-clinical research that we call SOAR – Support of Accelerated Research.

Like other innovative models for treatment-oriented research, SOAR is designed to bridge the gap between basic science and patient treatments. Here is how SOAR helps to meet that objective:

	Each SOAR project is comprised of a team of scientific labs and experts, each with defined, complementary expertise and skills in particular areas required for developing new treatments for Lysosomal Disease.
	SOAR scientists work as a collaborative, using a state-of-the-art, web-enabled IT infrastructure to facilitate work-flow management, data collection and data analysis.
	A SOAR team develops and implement its own research plan, working closely with a panel of scientific experts dedicated to the SOAR project. This panel vets the research plan’s initial design, monitors the team’s progress, and keeps it focused on reaching its objectives.
	Each SOAR collaborative enters into a contractual agreement with the Hide & Seek Foundation, in which it must agree to conduct research aimed at achieving specific objectives. As part of the same agreement, the team’s principal members must formally agree to collaborate fully and in a timely fashion with each other, to attend team meetings, and to share experimental planning, as well as strategy, and the results of experiments, reagents, resources, etc.

The first application of the SOAR research model is for research related to Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC). The SOAR-NPC project is designed to produce a pharmacologically-based and efficacious combinatorial therapy for NPC, i.e., a “cocktail” comprised of two or more compounds that have a cumulative impact of significantly delaying the symptoms and extending the lifespan of people afflicted with NPC disease. The time frame for developing this cocktail to a point ready for clinical trials is three years.  An "RFP" for the next SOAR project will be issued in the summer of 2008.

To download an overview of the SOAR-NPC project in pdf format, click here.

To read more about our partnership with CollabRx, visit www.collabrx.com.