“There are many people with an agenda out there, and they will ruthlessly torture statistics until they get the answer they want out of them.”
By Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data
News
🎾 Syntekabio to Showcase Innovative AI Drug Discovery Technologies at Bio-IT World
🏑 Webinar: Navigating the Frontier of AI-Assisted Drug Discovery Patents
🏒 The rise of subscription-based AI platforms for drug discovery
🏓 AI-gorithm: GenAI promises a booster dose for Indian pharma to scale up the value game
🏏 Elsevier and Iktos partner to deliver an AI-driven synthetic chemistry platform for drug discovery
🥍 Flipping the Script: Atomwise AI Platform Presents an Alternative to High Throughput Screening
🏸 The Top 5 Challenges in Drug Bioavailability That Can Be Solved by AI
🤽♂️ AI is a viable alternative to high throughput screening: a 318-target study
🤾 AI-driven RNA Drug Discovery Platform | Atomic AI
🚵♀️ Phoenix to Provide Decentralized Compute Solution for AI Drug Discovery and Life Sciences
🤺 Cognizant to apply generative AI to enhance drug discovery for pharmaceutical clients with NVIDIA BioNeMo
🏌️♀️ Google Cloud joins with biotech startups (PathAI, TetraScience) to accelerate AI-driven drug discovery and scientific research
AI-Based Drug Discovery Tools
✔ Consensus is a search engine that uses AI to find insights in research papers and now is using data annotations from Centaur Lab, a medical data labeling company for Text (Unstructured clinical notes, Scientific text, Chatbots and more), Audio (Heart auscultation, Lung auscultation, Artery auscultation and more), Images (Ultrasound, External images, X-ray and more), Video (Surgery, Clinical sessions and more) and Wave (EEG, ECG and more).
Eric Olson—CEO and co-founder of Consensus—describes his company: “…like Google Scholar + ChatGPT. Our goal is to make it easy to consume and search for peer-reviewed research, so dumb jocks like myself can sound smart in front of our friends” (Why old-school sports leadership is a natural fit for the new wave of AI startups).
According Eric, the four lessons in leadership—that he learned on the football field—and apply in the wild world of AI are:
Ignore the noise,
Control what you can control,
Everybody loves a good story and
Authentic leadership is the only leadership.
In 2024, the company
launched Consensus GPT: The Leading GPT for Research.
Consensus GPT is offering direct access to a vast database of over 200 million academic papers through the ChatGPT interface, empowering users to effortlessly discover research papers, extract key information and draft academically rigorous content. And
introduced the Consensus Copilot,
The Consensus Copilot can
Execute specific research tasks like: Draft me an outline of literature review on technology that can be used in the classroom to promote learning
Explain complex concepts in layman’s terms: Discuss the various supplements that help with nausea, do it in very simple language that a 10 year old could understand
Answer questions with flexible formatting and accurate citations like: Does creatine improve cognition? Group together the pro and con cases.
Centaur Lab raised a total of $16M.
✔ PipeBio, founded in 2020 in Denmark, is a cloud-based bioinformatics platform for biologics discovery, allowing wet lab scientists to easily analyze antibody and peptide sequences. They offer Antibody Discovery and Antibody Engineering, and they have the following tools for sequence analysis: Sequence storage and powerful querying, Configure workflows and automation by API and a Secure cloud platform.
Founded by Jannick Bendtsen and Owen Bodley, PipeBio now has an ambitious team behind that comes from different backgrounds, ranging from wet-lab biologists to computer engineers, with both academic and industrial experience.
April 2024: Bruker Cellular Analysis Beacon® Data in PipeBio Software.
They demonstrated that the Beacon system can efficiently recover high quality variable heavy and light chain sequences from cells that have been pre-screened for functional binding. Furthermore, the sequence and assay data can be brought together and analyzed in tandem in the easy-to-use PipeBio platform.
The Beacon Optofluidic System from Bruker Cellular Analysis (BCA; formerly Berkeley Lights) is an exciting technology that enables workflows for single cell analysis and functional characterization.
✔ Cradle Bio (Netherlands) exited stealth in 2022 and is using generative AI for protein engineering—enzymes, vaccines, peptides and antibodies—and cell factories. Cradle’s design platform makes it easy for everyone to start building products with biology instead of oil or animals, leveraging generative ML models to transform how biologists design and optimize proteins. The co-founder and CEO Stef Van Grieken and the co-founder Elise de Reus presented last year at the Slush Product Launch their product and Cradle—backed by Index Ventures and Kindred Capital—has raised a total of $33M.
In February 2024, Cradle partnered with Ginkgo and became part of the Ginkgo Technology Network.
Biology R&D teams that are already using Ginkgo’s technology will be able to easily access Cradle’s platform to engineer better proteins, faster, using generative ML models that are uniquely capable of multi property optimization and have passed extensive benchmarking and in-house wet-lab validation. Results to date show that teams who use the Cradle platform are 3.5x more productive in meeting their protein engineering objectives.
This means that progress that previously took 10 experimental rounds can now be achieved in 3 rounds or less.
And in March 2024, they presented a Case study: design better P450s 4X faster by combining AI-generated mutations with human expertise.
Their engineering goal was to increase the activity of a key P450 enzyme.
✔ DeepLife—is an early stage startup founded in 2019 in France by Jonathan Baptista and Jean-Baptiste Morlot—developing the first SaaS platform for Digital Twin of cells, combining state-of-the-art DL algorithms on multi-omics sequencing data, public and private cell atlases and proprietary DL-based cell engineering tools. Beyond using single cell RNA sequencing data, the DeepLife’s Digital Twin is set to expand and encapsulate additional data modalities, including genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, enabling unparalleled simulation of cellular states with each omics layer processed using their advanced LLM.
In November 2023, DeepLife entered a research collaboration with the University of Zurich (UZH) to reconstruct high-resolution model systems of cystinosis using digital twins of diseased cells. In particular, the Mechanisms of Inherited Kidney Disorders (MIKADO) group at UZH and DeepLife are collaborating to create digital twins of cystinosis-affected cells.
The MIKADO group will use its multi-omics databank from preclinical models and cystinosis patient cells alongside DeepLife's AI tools to create digital twins of diseased cells. Subsequently the MIKADO group at UZH will enhance drug discovery using digital twins of cells for in silico screening and target identification.
DeepLife has raised $6M.
✔ NewAtlantis (US)—dedicated to marine biodiversity and marine metagenomics for saving our oceans and preserving marine biodiversity—is about to quantify marine biodiversity with open meta omics to power sustainable and scalable ocean regeneration. At New Atlantis they believe that the phylogenetic diversity of the largely un-sequenced marine microbes and planktonic communities could provide a lot of novel potential secondary metabolites that might be of commercial interest. And with a partnership with Bacalhau—a platform for faster, cost efficient and more secure distributed computation, enabling users to run arbitrary Docker containers and WebAssembly images as tasks—they want to study the genome of the marine micro-organisms sampled directly from the ocean environment, using new high-throughput DNA sequencing technology and bioinformatics tools. Gordon Gould is the co-founder of New Atlantis.
This week Gordon is at the “Our Ocean Conference” in Athens, April 15-17, 2024.
✔ The UK startup Intelligent OMICS Intellomx has an Intuitive Informed Intelligence I3 methodology that finds novel biological targets that drive disease and their Digital Twin helps to predict pre-clinical toxicity effects, saving up to 90% of pre-clinical development costs and reducing the need for animal trials.
On September 1, 2023, Intellomx announced a target discovery collaboration with Janssen Research & Development, LLC (Janssen) to evaluate novel biological targets for the treatment of hematological cancers.
The collaboration will combine Intellomx’s proprietary AI platform, which integrates multi-omics data and DL algorithms to uncover novel disease mechanisms and therapeutic opportunities for treatment, with Janssen's expertise in data science, oncology research and development.
Intellomx is a spinout from Nottingham Trent University, and Dr. Robert Grundy is the CEO while Graham Ball is the CSO.
✔ Pathos—founded in 2020 in the US by serial entrepreneur and billionaire Eric Lefkofsky—is a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on re-engineering drug development, leveraging the power of advanced AI technologies to bring precision medicine to market. PathOS Platform™ is fueled by petabytes of real-world oncology data and patient-derived functional genomic data to identify and validate compelling biology that would have otherwise gone undetected using traditional methods. They blend wet lab and dry lab environments integrating advanced AI applications to re-engineer drug development for precision medicine.
On January 26, 2024, Pathos AI announced that it has successfully completed the acquisition of Rain Oncology Inc. Rain Oncology Inc. is a precision oncology company developing therapies that target oncogenic drivers to genetically select patients it believes will most likely benefit. Rain’s product candidate, milademetan, is a small molecule, oral inhibitor of the p53-MDM2 complex that reactivates p53.
Pathos has raised $40M. Ryan Fukushima is the cofounder and CEO of Pathos AI.
✔ Eleven Therapeutics founded in 2020 in Israel is harnessing the power of synthetic chemistry and AI to reimagine mRNA therapeutics. By utilizing massively parallel combinatorial chemistry and AI algorithms to unleash the full power of RNA, they are mapping the universe of RNA chemistry and reveal the structure-activity relationship of RNA molecules.
Their platform TERÅ beads is an end-to-end DEL-based platform to boost the performance of oligonucleotide therapeutics by DL the effects of chemical modifications. The first step of the TERÅ beads (topologically encoded, RNA-active) platform is to create a vast number of therapeutic RNA molecules with unique patterns of chemical modifications.
At the end of the process, in the final product (Bead DEL for chemically modified RNA molecules) each bead holds therapeutic RNA oligos with a unique chemical pattern and DNA barcodes that record the identity of these modifications.
Eleven Therapeutics—with three collaborative hubs in Cambridge, UK, Boston, US and Tel Aviv, Israel—has raised a total of $26.3M in funding over 3 rounds and was founded by Dr. Yaniv Erlich, Shaul Ilan and Prof. Greg Hannon.
✔ Glass Health, a digital notebook for clinicians. Founded (team) in 2021 in the US by Dereck Paul and Graham Ramsey, Glass Health is utilizing a technique called retrieval augmented generation to connect a large language model to their database of clinical guidelines created and maintained by the Glass Health Clinical Team of academic physicians.
In 2023, Glass Health Raises $5M for AI-Powered Clinical Decision Support Platform, by Initialised Capital (for a total of 7M).
In April 2024, Glass Health Joined the Google for Startups AI-First Accelerator. As part of this accelerator, Google provides Glass Health with access to expertise, mentorship, networking opportunities, and technical project guidance to enhance their Glass AI CDS platform.
✔ Aqemia is an in silico drug discovery start-up using quantum physics and AI to transform the drug discovery process. The company started in France in 2019, as a deeptech spin-off from École normale supérieure, and was founded by Maximilien Levesque and Emmanuelle Rolland-Martiano. Aqemia addresses drug discovery projects from their earliest stage by generating its own data using unique quantum physics algorithms from 12 years of research at Oxford, Cambridge and ENS/CNRS. The unprecedented pace - 10 000x faster - and accuracy of their physics algorithms enable them to guide efficiently their generative AI to discover innovative drug candidates more rapidly, and scale drug discovery projects as tech projects.
In December 2023, AQEMIA Announced a Major Multi-year Collaboration of $140M With Sanofi. As part of this agreement, Aqemia will design, working closely with Sanofi, novel drug molecules using its generative AI and deep physics algorithms and platform.
In January 2024, Aqemia raised €30M in Series A funding, for a total amount of €60M. The round was led by Wendel Growth with participation from Bpifrance Large Venture, Eurazeo and Elaia.
✔ Clarivate—the company which calculates journal’s impact factor using data from the Web of Science—offers the Cortellis Drug Discovery Intelligence™ to provide pharmaceutical and biotech companies with R&D insights to de-risk and accelerate drug discovery and avoid late-stage failures during clinical trials. The Web of Science is the world's leading scientific citation search and analytical information platform that provides access to multiple databases from academic journals, conference proceedings and other documents in various academic disciplines.
Last year, Clarivate (considered a global leader in connecting people and organizations to intelligence they can trust) partnered with VeriSIM (an AI-driven drug development engine designed to inform R&D decision-making) to de-risk drug development.
And this week, Clarivate announced an agreement to acquire the substantial majority of assets of MotionHall, a Silicon Valley technology start-up company serving the life sciences with industry vertical AI solutions. The asset purchase serves as a key component of the Clarivate™ Life Sciences & Healthcare strategy to deliver transformative intelligence through the application of generative AI and proprietary industry vertical AI solutions.
Until next time 🌾