AI drug discovery Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

Genentech’s lab in the loop aims to tap the power of quantity for quality drug discovery

[NVIDIA]

We can design chips that power self-driving cars and create physically-realistic video footage based on text descriptions. Yet, as Genentech’s Aviv Regev pointed out in a session about the company’s lab in the loop at NVIDIA’s GTC conference, the humble cells within us operate with a complexity that still eludes our full understanding.

It turns out that a cell is itself like a computational device with circuits and code, Regev said. These molecular “circuits” interact with each other, receive information, make decisions, and execute them. “These molecular circuits — they’re hard to reverse engineer,” she said. That hasn’t stopped scientists from spending decades trying to model and predict their behavior. “Mostly unsuccessfully, I can tell you,” Regev added.

But what if we could harness the same technological power driving those other breakthroughs to unravel t…

Denmark teams up with Novo Nordisk Foundation, NVIDIA to launch visionary AI research center

A total of 15,128 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs (pictured here) will be used in the Denmark AI Innovation Center. The hardware can support the development of advanced AI applications, from protein structure prediction to quantum computing research.

A collaboration between the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO), and NVIDIA will establish a national AI Innovation Centre in Denmark focused on accelerating research and innovation in fields including healthcare, life science, and quantum computing. The initiative is led on the Danish side by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which has committed roughly DKK 600 million (around $90 million) toward the initial costs of the center, and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO), which has contributed another DKK 100 million.

In a press briefing, Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA’s VP of healthcare, highlighted Denmark’s “…

Lantern Pharma aims to take drug to phase 3 for $100-200 million with AI-powered approach

Lantern Pharma’s AI-powered sprint

[Adobe Stock]

Lantern Pharma (NASDAQ: LTRN), a publicly traded clinical-stage biotech company with a market cap of around $79 million as of mid-March 2024, is shooting for developing $200 million drugs with a machine learning-based platform.

The oncology-focused firm Lantern Pharma, profiled last year, has developed a new drug (LP-284) in less than three years for under $3 million, which CEO Panna Sharma notes is “unheard of.” By using AI, Sharma projects that the company could develop a drug from concept to phase 3 trials for a price tag of $100–200 million — a small fraction of the typically $2.3 billion drug development price tag.

“We’re developing new drugs in less than two and a half years, from an idea through GMP manufacturing, to orphan indications, and multiple publications at ASH [American Society of Hematology] and SOHO [Society of Hem…

Microsoft and 1910 Genetics: AI-powered partnership targets billion-dollar savings and growth in drug discovery

[Image: 1910 Genetics]

The pharmaceutical industry is at a critical juncture: AI and other technological advances offer unprecedented potential, yet the cost of developing new drugs has ballooned for decades, surpassing $2 billion in recent years with the projected return on investment (ROI) falling to a mere 1.2% in 2022, according to Deloitte. Another dimension of the problem is the high failure rate — many potential drugs fall short in the expensive clinical trials.

Microsoft and 1910 Genetics have announced a partnership that aims to reverse the troubling trend.

Accelerating discovery with AI and quantum-inspired computing

Microsoft’s Azure Quantum Elements is at the core of this alliance. The platform integrates high-performance computing, AI, and quantum techniques for faster scientific discovery in chemistry and materials science. The goal is to democratize technologies like AI, high-performa…

Insilico Medicine’s latest AI-engineered drug ISM5411 could provide a novel approach for treating IBD

Alex Zhavoronkov, Ph.D.

Capping off a busy 2023, Insilico Medicine has announced a potentially first-in-class oral PHD inhibitor for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). ISM5411 is the fifth AI-backed drug candidate from Insilico Medicine to reach clinical stages.

ISM5411 targets prolyl hydroxylase domain (PHD) enzymes via modulation of the hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) pathway, which is involved in cellular response to low oxygen levels. By inhibiting PHD, ISM5411 aims to stabilize HIF, thereby enhancing the expression of genes that help protect the gut lining and reduce inflammation.

AI’s role in ISM5411’s development

To develop ISM5411, InSilico tapped its AI platform, Pharma.AI. This involved deploying Chemistry42, a generative AI engine, which created the structure-based small molecule based on the PHD target protein structure. “After obtaining a series of lead compound…

50 of the best-funded biotechs of 2023

[Adobe Stock]

As the year draws to a close, it is clear that molecular science and diagnostics is the hottest funding area in the biotech industry. In an analysis of 50 of the best-funded biotechs of 2023 focused on human health, molecular and science and diagnostics startups collectively attracting roughly $945 million, dwarfing the figures in other segments. The next popular two niches, gene therapies and oncology, had average funding levels of approximately $245 million and $170 million, respectively. While AI has received a significant amount of attention this year, biotechs specializing in that field garnered an average funding of only about $66 million. Outside of the life sciences, startups with a broader focus on AI raised a cumulative average of $202.47 million, based on an analysis of close to 1000 companies.

Caris Life Sciences has raised nearly $1.7B to date

In terms of best-funded companies overall,…

Verseon’s hybrid AI platform aims to unlock a universe of drug candidates

[Bhaskar/Adobe Stock]

The clinical-stage company Verseon (Fremont, California) is unique among companies exploring the use of AI in drug discovery given its focus on what it calls the “uncharted” chemical space. While Big Pharma companies typically test compounds from their collections for specific diseases, these collections often have constraints and overlapping compounds. Adityo Prakash, CEO of Verseon, estimates that researchers have developed about seven million chemically distinct compounds globally in the past century. But compared to that figure, the number of mappable compounds based on organic synthesis principles is a staggering 10^33.

Verseon is exploring uncharted chemical space

Adityo Prakash

Prakash emphasizes that while most AI companies involved in drug discovery focus on the narrower subset contained in current libraries, Verseon has …

BenevolentAI is pioneering AI-driven drug discovery methods

“Can we treat chronic inflammation in ulcerative colitis by reversing immune cell activation in colonic mucosa?” That’s an example of a biological question that the AI-enabled drug discovery firm BenevolentAI (AMS:BAI) would ask when exploring a new drug target.

Incorporating a disease, sign, mechanism and tissue into a single question provides focal points for the company’s AI models to explore when generating target hypotheses, said Anne Phelan, chief scientific officer of Benevolent AI in a presentation at the Royal Society earlier this year.

BenevolentAI’s strategy involves a comprehensive understanding of the biological systems underlying various diseases, breaking down silos in clinical areas and tapping diverse multimodal data to discover novel therapeutic targets. For ulcerative colitis, the company’s AI models sift through vast amounts of scientific literature and data to spot promising targets and pathways that could potentially alleviate …

Using AlphaFold, Insilico Medicine produces AI drug discovery in record time

This is the AI-powered autonomous robotics lab called Life Star in Suzhou that Insilico opened in January. [Insilico Medicine]

Capitalizing on AI drug discovery, an international group of researchers employed DeepMind’s deep learning-driven AlphaFold protein structure database to swiftly design and synthesize a potential hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) drug in only 30 days.

The AI drug discovery project consisted of Insilico Medicine, the University of Toronto’s Acceleration Consortium and researchers including Nobel laureate Michael Levitt. The team applied AlphaFold to Insilico’s end-to-end AI-powered drug discovery platform, Pharma.AI. With the integration of the biocomputational engine PandaOmics and the generative chemistry engine Chemistry42, the AI drug discovery project identified a novel treatment pathway for HCC and developed a potent inhibitor based on a predicted protein structure. Read more

Using AlphaFold, Insilico Medicine produces AI drug discovery in record time

This is the AI-powered autonomous robotics lab called Life Star in Suzhou that Insilico opened in January. [Insilico Medicine]

Capitalizing on AI drug discovery, an international group of researchers employed DeepMind’s deep learning-driven AlphaFold protein structure database to swiftly design and synthesize a potential hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) drug in only 30 days.

The AI drug discovery project consisted of Insilico Medicine, the University of Toronto’s Acceleration Consortium and researchers including Nobel laureate Michael Levitt. The team applied AlphaFold to Insilico’s end-to-end AI-powered drug discovery platform, Pharma.AI. With the integration of the biocomputational engine PandaOmics and the generative chemistry engine Chemistry42, the AI drug discovery project identified a novel treatment pathway for HCC and developed a potent inhibitor based on a predicted protein structure. Read more