II: Exploring 🧭 TechBio
Latest on TechBio ⛽: Adapsyn & Kapoose Creek, Archon, Aitia, Deep Origin, 1910 Genetics, SandboxAQ, Evogene, Indica Labs, SynSilico, Subtle Medical and OpenBench
For the first part of today’s update 🫴 I: Exploring 🧭 TechBio
Latest on TechBio ⛽: Insilico Medicine, Aikium, Twist Bioscience & Absci and Top 10 AI Applications
“Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.”
By Daniel C. Dennett, Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness
👾 Adapsyn Bioscience Inc and Kapoose Creek Bio
Kapoose Creek Bio, a biotech that specializes in discovering new drugs from nature using AI, just announced (October 30, 2024) an exclusive licensing and asset acquisition agreement with Adapsyn Bioscience (McMaster-affiliated Kapoose Creek Bio acquires Adapsyn tech, talent and drug-discovery lab). As part of the agreement, Kapoose Creek will gain access to Adapsyn’s AI technology and natural products database to advance its drug discovery activities.
Both companies already have close connections to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, since Adapsyn was spun out of McMaster professor Nathan Magarvey’s lab (at the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research) in 2016, and Kapoose Creek is headed by McMaster professor Eric Brown.
Adapsyn Bioscience (2016, Canada) has a genomics platform that identifies microbial strains that produce novel chemistry and they can predict the chemotype, structure, drug-likeness and even target of the resulting compounds. Its metabolomics platform allows them to identify novel and known compounds produced by microbes, which are automatically isolated for downstream evaluation, without messing around with cloning or cell-free production. Moreover their platform generates novel chemical libraries amenable to broad phenotypic characterization, high content screening and focused biochemical assays.
On September 21, 2022, Adapsyn announced a strategic collaboration with Evotec SE (Frankfurt Stock Exchange: EVT, MDAX/TecDAX, ISIN: DE0005664809; NASDAQ: EVO) to evaluate small molecules developed by Adapsyn as potential therapeutic candidates in proprietary and partnered drug discovery projects. And back in 2018 Adapsyn signed a $162M microbe-mining deal with Pfizer.
Kapoose Creek Bio in Vancouver Canada is using AI technologies to uncover small molecule medicines from nature with unprecedented speed and scale. They have developed a platform, unEarth Rx, that integrates phenotypic screening with advanced machine and deep learning to accelerate the identification of high-quality drug leads and simultaneously determine their mechanism of action. The result is a comprehensive, data-rich, functional map of nature’s chemistry for accelerated discovery and development of new small molecule medicines.
👾 Archon Biosciences Inc
Archon Biosciences just emerged from stealth with $20M in seed funding (Archon emerges from stealth with $20M and ‘antibody cages’ to power up drug development). The financing was led by Madrona Ventures with participation from DUMAC Inc., Sahsen Ventures, WRF Capital, Pack Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments and Cornucopian Capital.
Archon Biosciences is developing geometrically tunable protein therapeutics with differentiated distribution, engagement and function to target pathways other technologies cannot. This new biologic class, the Antibody Cage (AbC), was invented with the science and technology recognized by the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the Baker Lab in the Institute for Protein Design (IPD) (Archon Co-Founder David Baker, Ph.D., awarded 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering work in computational protein design).
AbCs are engineered with complete control over antibody orientation, binding domain valency, size, shape and rigidity. AbCs combine AI design with structural control to create better biologics. In particular, Archon's AbC platform leverages geometric engineering to control biodistribution and engagement to unlock challenging therapeutic targets that other technologies cannot.
👾 Aitia (GNS Healthcare Inc)
On October 30, 2024, Aitia expanded its collaboration with Servier (an independent international pharmaceutical group) to tackle gliomas, a broad group of brain cancers (Aitia Expand Collaboration with Servier to Discover and Develop New Drugs for Brain Cancer Using AI-Driven Digital Twins). Aitia and Servier work together to discover and validate novel drug targets and develop novel drug candidates for glioma using Aitia's Gemini Digital Twins and Servier's therapeutic discovery and clinical development expertise in oncology.
Back on May 17, 2023, Aitia Entered into Multi-Year AI-Driven Drug Discovery and Drug Simulation Collaboration with Servier for Pancreatic Cancer. This project with the French pharma group Servier was on pancreatic cancer, and builds on a collaboration in the blood cancer multiple myeloma that was started by the two companies in 2022. Moreover on January 08, 2024, Servier and Aitia strengthened their partnership by signing a new contract focused on collaboration in neuroscience, to identify patients most likely to respond positively to Servier’s Leucine-Rich-Repeat-Kinase 2 inhibitor (LRRK2i) in development treatment for Parkinson’s disease.
GNS Healthcare, now AITIA BIO (US), uses its Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation (REFS) or Gemini Digital Twins, by combining multi-omic and clinical patient data and by using Aitia’s patented causal AI and simulation technology named REFS, to analyze RWD and clinical trial data to model patient responses to treatments in silico, and has worked with biopharma companies, including Amgen, BMS, Celgene, Johnson & Johnson and Novartis.
The “Digital Twins” Aitia is creating, can link patients’ characteristics to diverse drug treatments, in order to reveal complex genetic and molecular mechanisms and pathways driving clinical outcomes. For now, Aitia is advancing drug discovery programs in multiple myeloma, prostate cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease and Huntington’s Disease.
On March 15, 2023, UCB (EBR: UCB), a global biopharmaceutical company, and Aitia announced an early drug discovery collaboration focused on the discovery and validation of novel drug targets and drug candidates for Huntington’s disease. On September 26, 2024, Orion and Aitia partnered for AI-driven oncology drug discovery. The Finnish pharmaceutical company Orion and Aitia will leverage the Digital Twins technology of Aitia along with Orion’s (HEL: ORNBV) extensive pre-clinical and clinical expertise to discover and validate new drug targets.
GNS Healthcare as of January 9, 2023 is Aitia Bio.
👾 Deep Origin
Deep Origin helps scientists to develop drugs and extend healthspan by building tools that simplify R&D, simulate biology and untangle the complexity of life. For example, they are working on a Useful AI Assistant for Drug Discovery: Meet Balto. Balto is offering a better than 10x performance of major molecular modeling tools and was launched on October 30, 2024 (Deep Origin Launches First and Only Drug Discovery Assistant with Conversational AI Interface and Top Docking Technology).
Balto is the first drug discovery assistant of its kind using proprietary, state-of-the-art molecular modeling tools, and its AI and physics-based docking and chemical property prediction models outperforms open source and other commercial tools by up to a 10x greater enrichment factor. It gathers data across web databases like ChEMBL, BindingDB and others (gathers chemical data, converts PDF to SMILES, summarizes and interacts with articles). It locates pockets and strategizes investigation guided by a chem-aware AI. Docks the identified molecules in a simple conversation. Gets state-of-the-art binding scores and AI predicated chemical properties in minutes and saves days of software setup giving med-chemist teams superpowers.
By democratizing access to these models with a simple, conversational interface users can load a protein structure, dock small molecules to it, analyze pose and docking score and predict chemical properties. And unlike other chat solutions Balto is aware of scientific context and concepts. Finally, Balto Basic is priced at $32/month.
Deep Origin also offers an R&D platform (harness the power of seamless data management, scalable data processing and AI-driven analysis - all in one platform) and a Molecular simulation toolkit (for physicochemical simulations and AI for interrogating biology at the atomistic scale). The Molecular simulation toolkit (available through Jupyter notebooks in software blueprints on their cloud platform) includes: Atomistic ligand docking, Molecular properties AI: solubility, toxicity, etc. and Atomistic molecular dynamics.
The Deep Origin OS platform in beta, helps life science researchers turn diverse data into insights in minutes, including:
👍 Easily and rapidly getting research data in AI-ready and shareable formats
👍 Creating experimental notes, protocols, code, results and tracking relationships
👍 Turning data into publication-ready figures with our no-code AI assistant
👍 Much, much more!