precision medicine Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

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 “…

Why Merck shelled out $30B+ on R&D in 2023

In 2023, Merck & Co. made a considerable investment in research and development, spending more than $30 billion. This figure represents more than double the company’s R&D spending ($13.5 billion) in 2022.

The closest competitor in terms of R&D investment was Roche Pharmaceuticals, with a 2023 R&D expenditure of roughly $14.7 billion. This sum is less than half of Merck’s spending. Next in line was Novartis, which spent approximately $13.7 billion on R&D. Next in line was Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, which spent about $12 billion.

In 2023, Merck’s revenue narrowly eclipsed that of Pfizer, which fell 41.7% from 2022 levels owing largely to collapsing demand for COVID-19 products.

In 2023, Merck invested roughly half of its revenue in R&D.

The chief drivers of Merck’s R&D spending included the following:

Prome…

Pushing the frontier of drug discovery with the world’s most powerful supercomputer

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier supercomputer. [Credit: ORNL]

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer with its dizzying 1.1 exaflop speed, is a game-changer for scientific domains ranging from drug discovery to material science and oceanography. The computer holds the top spot on the TOP500 list, an independent ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. “It’s like having a million laptops going into one core,” says Niven R. Narain, Ph.D., CEO of the biopharmaceutical company BPGbio. The company has forged an exclusive partnership with Oak Ridge that enables them to harness the staggering power of Frontier for drug discovery. “Things that historically would have taken us six to nine months to process, it’s like nine hours,” Narain said.

Access to Frontier “changed our company overnight,” Narain said. With…

Off with the training wheels: AI-based patient characterization can improve clinical trial performance without large data sets

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Only 12% of new drug candidates that enter phase 1 clinical development ultimately receive FDA approval. This dismal success rate leaves millions of patients with unmet medical needs and drives up the costs for the small number of drugs that make it to market. More frustratingly, it leaves untold numbers of potentially transformative therapies back-burnered or discarded entirely, not because they don’t actually provide benefit, but because they were tested in trials that weren’t effectively designed to demonstrate benefit. The true failure hasn’t been in drug innovation but in identifying the patient traits that govern clinical trial outcomes.

The big challenges of big data methodologies

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds great promise in improving this success rate by providing data-driven approaches to identifying traits and their combinations that enable more effective paradigms to enrich patien…

How digital pathology can transform the value of clinical trial information

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The field of pathology is gradually going digital, marking a pronounced shift from the traditional use of glass slides, a practice that dates back to the Victorian era. Digital pathology uptake reached an “exponential” pace in the wake of the pandemic, noted Dr. Monika Lamba Saini, director of pathology, at Q2 Solutions, an IQVIA subsidiary.

Adoption has grown from a negligible amount to roughly 15% over the past five years, said David West, CEO of Proscia, a digital pathology company, and a Q2 Solutions partner. The Digital Pathology Association notes that adoption in recent years has been brisk, hovering between 27% and 37% growth from 2021 to 2023, with the pandemic serving as an accelerant. Growth is cooling but is still brisk. According to Proscia’s 2023 Life Sciences Digital Pathology Adoption Survey, 70% of life sciences organizations were using digital pathology, with an additional 53% of t…

Deepcell’s CEO forges her own path to transforming cell science with AI and microfluidics

Deepcell co-founder Maddison Masaeli took an unexpected path from academic research to launching an AI-powered cell analysis platform. The company has raised close to $100 million in funding to support its mission. This includes a $73 million Series B round and an earlier $20 million Series A round. The company has entered into a research collaboration with NVIDIA and made generative AI a core focus of their research and development efforts.

From electrical engineering to AI-powered biology

The Deepcell CEO since the company’s founding, Masaeli’s journey shifted from her bachelor’s study of electrical engineering to the life sciences when a chance encounter brought her to a biotech lab as a Harvard-MIT research scholar. “I randomly got introduced to this amazing biotech lab at Harvard at a social event,” she recalled. “I decided to go and explore and see what that was all about.”

The lab specialized in developing methods for tissue engineering…

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…

50 of the best-funded biotechs of 2023

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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,…

Alzheimer’s at an inflection point as drug and diagnostics breakthroughs emerge

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Alzheimer’s disease research appears to be hitting its stride, thanks to recent therapeutic advances in drug development and the emergence of biomarkers to detect the condition. “All the pieces of the puzzle of precision medicine, which is already quite common in oncology, are now in place,” said Hartmuth Kolb, vice president, neuroscience biomarkers and R&D global imaging at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine.

There’s urgency to stem the tide of the disease, which not only can be heart-wrenching for patients and caregivers, but also its financial burden. The cost of caring for individuals living with Alzheimer’s or other dementias in the U.S. could hit $345 billion in 2023, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, marking a $24 billion increase over the prior year.

Aiming to stop the cascade

FDA has approved two amyloid-targeting antibodies, lecanemab and …

PathAI launches AISight digital pathology platform and NSCLC algorithm

PathAI has launched a new digital pathology platform, AISight. Supporting AI-driven research, the digital pathology platform was trained on a real-world dataset of over 5,000 samples with inputs from more than 350,000 cell and tissue-level annotations from more than 50 pathologists. The company has also released its AIM-PD-L1 NSCLC RUO algorithm, which calculates the percentage of PD-L1 positive tumor and immune cells in NSCLC samples. The AIM-PD-L1 NSCLC RUO algorithm calculates the percentage of PD-L1 positive tumor and immune cells in NSCLC samples over the entire slide image (WSI).

Validating the AIM-PD-L1 NSCLC algorithm

PathAI previously shared validation data for the AIM-PD-L1 NSCLC algorithm at the AACR Annual Meeting in 2022. The AISight Early Access Network laboratories will build on this work by testing the algorithm’s performance on real-world data. Other IHC quantitation algorithms for various types of cancer are also available to these labs. PathAI…

The transformation of precision medicine in infectious disease

Phage image courtesy of Locus Biosciences

Before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, another more selective antibacterial agent rose to popularity in the early 1900s: bacteriophage.

In 1917, microbiologist Felix d’Herelle was tasked with identifying the cause of a dysentery outbreak impacting French troops. From his research, he noticed that Shigella bacteria was the primary culprit of this affliction. He then discovered an invisible microorganism that targeted and eliminated the dysentery bacillus, or rod-shaped bacteria, which he eventually named ‘bacteriophage’ (also known by the shorthand ‘phage’) for its supposed bacteria-eating capabilities. D’Herelle would later apply this knowledge to successfully treat children suffering from severe dysentery at the Hospital des Enfants Malades in Paris and create cures for other pathogens like cholera and typhoid. Encouraged by d’Herelle’s contributions and si…