I: Weekly TechBio News
Latest Trends: 💈 Atropos Health and Merck & Co., 💈 UCB and Ailux, 💈 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), 💈 Absci, 💈 Collaborations Pharmaceuticals and 💈 iBio and AstralBio
I: Weekly TechBio News
Latest Trends: 💈 Atropos Health and Merck & Co., 💈 UCB and Ailux, 💈 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), 💈 Absci, 💈 Collaborations Pharmaceuticals and 💈 iBio and AstralBio
“Believe in your infinite potential. Your only limitations are those you set upon yourself.”
By Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
I: Weekly TechBio News
💈 Atropos Health and Merck & Co.
On January 11, 2025, Atropos Health (Atropos Health Inc) in the US and Merck & Co. partnered to produce rapid analytics and evidence generation that may speed up R&D. Through the collaboration, Merck will leverage Atropos' various real-world evidence (RWE) generation platforms, and the expertise of its workforce, for rapid cohort creation, advanced analytics and the generation of comprehensive studies in under 48 hours (Merck taps Atropos Health to accelerate drug development with real-world data). In order to do so, Merck will install the Generative Evidence Acceleration Operating System (GENEVA OS) into its in-house cloud infrastructure. In this way, Merck will have access to the Atropos Evidence Network (the largest federated data network in healthcare), which contains over 300 million patient records.
The Evidence Generation Tools include: ChatRWD (the first generative AI application to deliver full observational studies on healthcare data in minutes), Green Button (a get on-demand evidence in 48 hours simply by asking a question), Alexandria (a collection of tens of thousands of existing studies, including active clinical trial designs) and Forge (a low-code research platform). Another feature called the Real World Fitness Score evaluates data for relevancy to help generate more "fit-for-purpose" evidence.
Atropos Health is the developer of the first physician consultation service powered by publication-grade real-world evidence. Using millions of anonymized patient records, the company helps providers answer clinical questions that have fallen through the cracks of the evidence-based literature. Atropos spun out of the School of Medicine at Stanford University in 2020 after a successful multi-year pilot that generated new evidence across 18 clinical specialties.
On January 12, 2025, Atropos Health’s platform, including GENEVA OS and the Atropos Evidence Network, were launched at scale. Before last Christmas (December 18, 2024) Atropos announced a partnership with Scipher Medicine to accelerate precision medicine and expand the Immunology Multimodal Network, advancing shared decision-making for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Scipher’s PrismRA® precision medicine diagnostic test identifies patients who are unlikely to respond to specific RA therapies, enabling personalized treatment decisions. Always in 2024, Atropos announced a strategic partnership with Norstella, one of the largest global pharma intelligence solution providers. Through this partnership, Atropos Health will leverage Norstella’s extensive reach, including companies such as Panalgo, Citeline, Evaluate, MMIT, and The Dedham Group, to rapidly expand the adoption of its Generative AI platform, GENEVA OS.
Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, US holds the rights in the trademark MERCK in the U.S. and Canada and is an unaffiliated and unrelated company with Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany or Merck Group that operates in the U.S. and Canada as EMD Serono in Healthcare, MilliporeSigma in Life Science and EMD Electronics in Electronics (FWB: MRK, FWB: MRKC). Merck & Co., Inc. (Merck Sharp & Dohme or MSD outside the United States and Canada) trades as (NYSE: MRK), and other Merck’s TechBio collaborations include:
📯 On February 20, 2024, Evaxion Biotech A/S (NASDAQ: EVAX), a clinical-stage TechBio company specializing in developing AI-Immunology powered vaccines, announced the successful completion of the initial phases of its vaccine collaboration with MSD. The vaccine development project combines both organizations' unique capabilities and know-how.
📯 On June 16, 2023, MSD announced the completion of the Prometheus Biosciences, Inc acquisition. Prometheus had a proprietary bioinformatics discovery platform using advanced ML techniques namely the Prometheus360, that combines PrometheusIQ a state-of-the-art data analytics that continually identifies new targets and PrometheusID a diverse collection of IBD biospecimens and detailed metadata—offering the potential to pinpoint the right treatment for the right patient.
📯 On November 29, 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc (AWS) announced it is working with Accenture to help MSD move a substantial portion of its IT infrastructure to AWS as part of the company’s multiyear cloud migration. As part of this initiative, Merck selected AWS as its preferred cloud services provider and Accenture as its professional services partner to transition core applications like SAP, ML and data warehouses to AWS—enabling Merck to help accelerate scientific research and discovery.
📯 Owkin, a French-American biotechnology company that applies AI to drug discovery, development and diagnostics, announced that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with MSD (trade name of Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, N.J., USA) back in 2023, in order to develop and commercialize AI-powered digital pathology diagnostics for the EU market.
📯 Merck selected in 2022 Saama to add ML tech to drug development process. Saama (US, 1997) is a data analytics company and will work with Merck & Co. to build a new clinical data management system, using its own Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC). LSAC is powered by cloud computing and AI/ML technologies, trained using more than 100 million clinical data points. Saama’s system is technology-agnostic, so it can be easily slotted into Merck's existing infrastructure.
📯 On November 29, 2022, BigHat announced a collaboration with Merck (NYSE: MRK), known as MSD outside of the United States and Canada, to apply the company’s technology to design candidates for up to three drug discovery programs. BigHat’s (2019, US) mission is to improve human health by making it far easier to design advanced, next-generation antibody therapeutics with their AI-enabled experimental platform (the Milliner™ platform), that integrates a high-speed characterization or “wet” lab with ML technologies to speed the antibody engineering process.