AI For Drug Discovery: Weekly News 🦑
📗 Agenus and Noetic partnered
Agenus Inc (Nasdaq: AGEN), a leader in immuno-oncology innovation, and Noetik announced a research collaboration to develop predictive biomarkers of response to Agenus’ lead clinical stage immuno-oncology combination, ➡️ botensilimab (BOT, multifunctional Fc-enhanced anti-CTLA-4) and ➡️ balstilimab (BAL, anti-PD-1). The collaboration harnesses Noetik’s proprietary virtual cell foundation models and large-scale, multimodal tumor data to uncover novel insights into the biology of tumor immunology (Agenus and Noetik Enter Collaboration to Develop AI-Enabled Predictive Biomarkers for BOT/BAL Using Foundation Models of Virtual Cell Biology).
Noetik is an AI drug discovery company leveraging spatial data (being the biggest user of two new platforms from two different spatial companies, one for proteomics and the other for transcriptomics) to develop cancer immunotherapies, and was launched with💲1️⃣4️⃣M seed 🌱 financing from two former leaders of Recursion Pharmaceuticals. Noetik combines self-supervised learning with the industrial-scale generation of human multimodal data.
In 2023, Noetik announced the pairing of its multimodal human data atlas with an innovative in vivo functional genomics platform to power the development of precision cancer immunotherapies (Noetik Launches "Perturb-map" In Vivo Functional Genomics Platform and Adds Precision Immunology Leader Brian Brown, Ph.D. to Scientific Advisory Board).
On September 14, 2014, Noetic announced that it has been selected for the second cohort of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, launched by Amazon Web Services Inc (AWS).
On August 30, 2024, AI-based Noetik closed on an oversubscribed $40M series A.
At the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting in 2025, Noetik unveiled two AI-driven discovery tools: ✳️ OCTO-virtual cell and ✳️ Perturb-map (Noetik Presents Multimodal Discovery Engines at AACR 2025: OCTO-virtual cell and Perturb-map). ➡️ OCTO-virtual cell is a foundation model of cell and tissue biology, and ➡️ Perturb-map, is a high-throughput in vivo system for therapeutic target identification and immunophenotype modeling.
📗 Elucidata and Sapien Biosciences partnered
Elucidata, a leader in data-centric AI for drug discovery and translational research, and Sapien Biosciences, Indians 🇮🇳 first and largest commercial biobank with 3️⃣0️⃣0️⃣,0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣+ patient samples founded in partnership with Apollo Hospitals, announced a strategic partnership to convert Sapien’s extensive biobank assets into AI-ready, multimodal data products for use in drug and diagnostic development (Elucidata and Sapien Biosciences Announce Strategic Partnership to Transform Biobank Assets into high quality AI Products).
Through this collaboration, Sapien will harness Elucidata’s platform to integrate, standardize, and enrich its vast repository of biospecimens and curated clinical data, making them accessible for predictive modeling, synthetic data generation, and advanced genomics research.
Elucidata’s data harmonization platform 👉 Polly, helps research teams make multi-modal biomedical data ML ready. Polly transforms multi-modal and multi-source biomedical data (Omics, Assay, Real World Data, Clinical & EHR Data, and CRO data) into a Unified Data Model, with their 10X faster LLM-powered curation and human-in-the-loop model to achieve 99.99% accuracy.