Biotech Innovations Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

Skynet with benefits: Can AI and humans become a drug discovery superorganism?

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Will the credit for future mega-blockbuster drugs, in some cases, go to a carefully-programmed AI discovery system connected to a “self-driving lab” that verified its potential?

Certainly, AI is hyped, but so are potential profits of potentially AI-optimized drugs. The exploding volumes of scientific data highlight a shift often overlooked: what does “inventor” even mean when human brilliance relies on AI and vast datasets no single person can comprehend? This future depends in part on connecting the dots between data experts, lab scientists with domain knowledge, and the machine learning systems capable of pattern recognition humans can’t even fathom. But the crux isn’t simply generating more data, and making it a shared, dynamic force fueling breakthrough discoveries — a force deeply integrated with computation and human expertise.

Breaking through the data bottleneck

Merck, Amgen back Culmination Bio’s quest to transform healthcare data analytics

In the same week that Merck and Amgen revealed expanded alliances with AWS, the bioinformatics startup Culmination Bio revealed that it has received $10 million in funding from the venture arms of those companies, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and Amgen Ventures. Culmination Bio, a spinoff from Intermountain Health, has developed a vast data lake of de-identified patient records spanning over 40 years.

Dr. Lincoln Nadauld, CEO of the startup, notes that the funding is evidence that the data it has collected can address pharma’s longstanding quest to boost the efficiency of drug discovery and development. Frequently, pharma companies have “access to vast datasets, but those datasets are often not the right kind of data,” Nadauld said. “It’s fragmented, or it’s unstructured, or it’s deficient in some fashion.”

Culmination Bio readies data lake based on four decades of patient health records

Consequently, Culmination Bio is confident that t…

AI in antibody drug discovery as a tool, not a magic wand

Early in the pandemic, AbCellera entered into a partnership with Lilly to co-develop antibody therapies for COVID-19. The pact eventually led to the development of a number of antibodies, including bamlanivimab, etesevimab and bebtelovimab. Shown here is the antibody bebtelovimab binding to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, highlighting key mutations from the omicron variant. The green structures represent the target-binding fragments (Fabs) of bebtelovimab, while the purple structure show the virus’s spike protein, with omicron mutations highlighted in red.

AI in drug discovery is a topic that gets an outsized amount of attention, observes Carl Hansen, CEO of AbCellera, a company specializing in antibody drug discovery. “It’s as if people are saying, ‘AI is here, it’s going to save us. Thank God, we’re finally gonna be able to create drugs,” he said. “To me, that’s implicitly …

Cellarity CEO: AI will fail in drug discovery unless we decode complex disease biology

[Credit: Cellarity]

The traditional drug discovery approach is broken, but so too are the approaches of many AI-focused organizations seeking to reboot the process. That’s the perspective of Fabrice Chouraqui, CEO of Cellarity and CEO Partner at the investment firm Flagship Pioneering, which played a role in launching Moderna in 2010. While a growing number of companies are focused on using AI to streamline drug discovery, the approach is still something like gambling with long odds. Traditional drug developers tend to “place a bet on a single molecular target very early on,” he said.

Despite the dizzying pace of scientific development, the fundamental approach of drug discovery has seen limited evolution. While organizations are exploring strategies to redefine the process, they often bring a new tool to an existing process. With new technologies like AI, the initial thought is often to apply it to famil…

Anti-obesity drugs to command a $44 billion market by 2030

As obesity rates continue to soar across the globe, analysts anticipate that the market for anti-obesity drugs will skyrocket in the coming years. Goldman Sachs projects the market to be worth $44 billion by 2030. That’s an almost 16-fold expansion from its valuation of approximately $2.82 billion in 2022.

Jenny Chang, portfolio manager with Goldman Sachs Asset Management, highlighted the potential of the drug class, which includes Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic (semaglutide) and Wegovy (also semaglutide), as well as Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide. “Some 42% of Americans are obese, and the economic toll is staggering,” she said in a recent video. The investment firm noted that obesity costs the American healthcare system are in the ballpark of $170 billion annually. Furthermore, the obesity epidemic could drag down global GDP by $4 trillion by 2035.

Echoing this sentiment, JPMorgan Chase & Co. believes Novo Nordisk could capture almost half o…