Brisbane Startup Wants to Film the Proteins Behind Alzheimer's

A photograph of a street corner tells you who was standing there. It does not tell you whether they were waiting for a bus, leaving a shop or arguing.

A fixed image of a protein is like that. It shows where the protein sat at one instant, and says little about where it was going or whom it joined. A platform from the University of Queensland (UQ) is an attempt to swap the photograph for film.

It is called NASTIC, short for Nanoscale Spatiotemporal Indexing Clustering. UQ says it lets researchers study biological processes in living cells, across space and time, at the level of single molecules ^[1][3]. On October 19, 2026, the university announced that the technology has been spun out into a Brisbane company, Accretion Bio, which intends to use it to look for drugs against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's ^[3].

That is the news. It is worth being exact about what it is.

NASTIC is a research tool with a published scientific basis. It is not a drug, and nothing released so far shows that it has produced a better one.

From a still to a trajectory

The method starts with a microscope. In the approach laid out in a 2025 paper in Nature Protocols, a super-resolution microscope records the individual trajectories of proteins in living cells ^[2]. The record is the path each protein takes.

The paper describes two ways of getting a protein into view. One images proteins a researcher has introduced into the cell, called expressed proteins. The other images the cell's own proteins, the endogenous ones, using nanobodies, which are small antibody-like molecules that latch on to a target ^[2]. The second route matters because it images the cell's own proteins and not only ones added from outside.

Then comes the software, and this is where NASTIC earns its name. Proteins in a cell do not wander alone. They gather in small clusters, often only for a moment. To find them, NASTIC uses spatial indexing, a way of organising the recorded paths by position so that places where many trajectories overlap can be found ^[2][4].

A cluster found that way is only half the picture. The same patch of membrane can host a crowd at one moment and be empty at the next, and a map of overlaps alone would merge the two. So the method adds time. It can tell a crowd that gathers at a spot at nine o'clock from a different crowd gathering there at noon, the way a bus stop is not the same event in the morning rush and at midnight ^[2][4].

Out of that come numbers a still image cannot give. The 2023 paper that introduced the approach describes measuring how long a cluster lasts, how often new ones form, and where recurring hotspots sit ^[4]. In that paper, Wallis and colleagues reported transient clustering of two proteins, syntaxin1a and Munc18-1 ^[4]. It was a demonstration that the idea works, on proteins chosen to show it.

Why drug hunters might care

The case for the tool rests on a simple comparison. If you can measure how a target protein moves and clusters, you can measure it twice, with and without a candidate compound, and see whether the behaviour changes. That is the opportunity UQ's Professor Frederic Meunier pointed to when he described tracking proteins and observing the effects of drug candidates ^[3].

Phillip Craig, the founder and chief executive of Accretion Bio, put the gap in commercial terms. Drug developers, he argued, lack mechanistic data about what happens inside living cells ^[3]. A fixed image or an indirect readout can say that a compound did something. A film of the protein might say how.

That is a rationale for running experiments. It is not a record of experiments that worked, and the distinction decides how much weight the announcement can bear.

Two decades in the making

NASTIC did not appear overnight. UQ says it grew out of more than two decades of research at the Queensland Brain Institute, led by Meunier, with Dr Tristan Wallis as a technology co-founder of the company ^[3]. The published trail is visible: the 2023 paper in Nature Communications that set out the spatiotemporal indexing method ^[4], and the 2025 protocol that turns it into a recipe others can follow ^[2].

That recipe is not a casual one. The protocol says the procedure takes two to four days, and it is meant for users who already have some experience in super-resolution microscopy and in analysing microscopy data ^[2]. This is a method for specialist labs, and the pharmaceutical groups UQ says are interested would be buying expertise as much as software.

The code has also changed hands. Wallis's public GitHub repository carries a notice that development and release of NASTIC moved to the UniQuest store in May 2026 ^[5].

UniQuest is UQ's commercialisation company. Its product page says academic research and teaching use is free under licence ^[6]. For commercial users, the announcement gives no terms.

What the company says it will do

Accretion Bio was founded by Craig, with Meunier and Wallis as technology co-founders. UQ says it has the support of UniQuest and backing from Antler ^[3]. Craig said the company plans to apply NASTIC with pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners, and also to advance its own drug discovery program for neurodegenerative diseases ^[3].

UQ also says industry-funded research using the technology is already underway at the Queensland Brain Institute, and that global pharmaceutical companies have shown interest ^[3]. It does not name them, and it discloses no results ^[3].

Nor does it say which Alzheimer's or Parkinson's proteins have been tracked with NASTIC in living neurons, or whether any such work has been published.

The published papers show the method working on other proteins and describe how it would be applied. Whether it has followed a disease-linked protein through the stages of a disease, improved a drug candidate or helped a patient has not been shown. The headline promise of the announcement, a live view of the proteins behind these diseases, is still a promise.

UQ sees reach beyond the brain. It says the same approach could be used to study receptor clustering in cell signalling, a question in immunology and cancer research ^[3].

What it means

I think the interest here is real, and so is the risk of overreading it. Anything that lets researchers see what a compound does to a protein inside a living cell is worth having. A measurement taken before money is spent is cheaper than a failure found after.

But a better measurement is not a better drug. The step between them is a decision, a team choosing to drop one candidate and push another because of what the film showed.

No published example of that happening with NASTIC has been reported. Until someone produces one, the tool's value to drug discovery is an argument, a sensible one, and no more.

What to watch

The first thing to look for is data. A paper showing a named Alzheimer's- or Parkinson's-linked protein tracked in living neurons, with and without a compound, would move this from plausible to demonstrated. The second is how NASTIC compares with the live-cell imaging and clustering methods already in labs, on repeatability, sensitivity and the time analysis takes. The third is who the industry partners turn out to be, and whether any of them says in public that the film changed a decision.