Innovative TechBio Ideas: AI/ML tools, startups, companies and investors (2nd part)
MetaphysicalCells: A newsletter about Science, Technology and AI Drug Discovery
For the first part: “Innovative TechBio Ideas: AI/ML tools, startups, companies and investors”.
Today’s Quote
"Evolution has performed experiment after experiment and found simple rules that work well in many contexts. It has downloaded much of this knowledge into our DNA. This comprises 10 megabytes, a very compact description indeed of such a complex world. I argue that this understanding arises from exploiting this compact description of the world."
By Eric B. Baum (What Is Thought? (A Bradford Book))
Fresh News 🎣
🐠 Vancouver’s Absci reports loss for 2023 but still moving forward with ‘AI-driven biologic drug discovery’
Absci reported a loss for 2023, but the Vancouver-based company also brought in $86 million in gross proceeds from its common stock offering. Absci is a generative AI drug creation company that combines AI with scalable wet lab technologies to create better biologics for patients, faster.
In January 2023, AbSci became the first company “to create and validate de novo antibodies in silico” using generative AI. In April 2023, AbSci and M2GEN (now Aster Insights), an oncology-focused health informatics solutions company with the most advanced lifetime consented clinico-genomics data, announced a partnership to create new cancer medicines. In particular, Absci’s generative AI drug creation platform will tap into M2GEN’s clinical and molecular data set, ORIEN AVATAR, to accelerate the creation of onco-therapeutics. And in December 2023, Absci announced a collaboration with AstraZeneca to deliver an AI-designed antibody against an oncology target.
Absci has raised a total of $324,3M in funding over 10 rounds.
Atomic AI
Atomic AI (US, 2021) is working with the understudied RNA aiming to do for RNA what AlphaFold did for proteins. PARSE, is Atomic AI’s proprietary AI-driven 3D RNA structure engine, that generates RNA structural datasets, integrating ML foundation models with large-scale, in-house experimental wet-lab biology to unveil functional binders to RNA targets. This allows Atomic AI to predict structured, ligandable RNA motifs at an unprecedented speed and accuracy, a key barrier to current approaches in RNA drug discovery.
In December 2023, Atomic AI announced that has created the first large language model (LLM) leveraging chemical mapping data—its proprietary ATOM-1™ platform component—a foundation model that can accurately predict the structure and function of RNA and help dramatically improve development of RNA therapeutics (ATOM-1: A Foundation Model for RNA Structure and Function Built on Chemical Mapping Data).
“There’s this central dogma that DNA goes to RNA, which goes to proteins. But it’s emerged in recent years that it does much more than just encode information. If you look at the human genome, about 2% becomes protein at some point. But 80 percent becomes RNA. And it’s doing… who knows what? It’s vastly underexplored!”
By Atomic AI’s CEO and founder, Raphael Townshend
In January 2023, the company announced a $35M Series A funding round led by Playground and so far has raised a total of $42M.
Drug-Resistant Bacteria Stymied by AI-Designed Antibiotics
Stanford and McMaster University researchers created an artificial intelligence (AI) model to design molecules that inhibit the growth of Acinetobacter baumannii, a common drug-resistant bacteria 🦠.
Let’s now see some notable AI Pharma Deals for the period 2022-2023. 🥂