TechBio September 🍃 News (part I)
TechBio September 🍃 News (part I)
✴️ BioAge Labs (Longevity), 🔷 GenoFab (Fighting Reproducibility Crisis) and ✳️ Syntekabio (South Korea and AI Drug Discovery)
Consciousness creates reality, and reality is consciousness
(Experiment Suggests That Consciousness May Be Rooted in Quantum Physics)
September News 🏃♀️
Lantern Pharma Webinar: Harmonic Clinical Trial for Never Smokers with NSCLC-Preliminary patient data readout
Lantern Pharma Inc. (LTRN): A Penny Stock That Will Make You a Millionaire
In this episode 🎙 Dr. Hubert Zajicek, MD, MBA sits down with the President and CEO Panna Sharma to discuss his remarkable journey at the helm of Lantern Pharma Inc. (Nasdaq: LTRN)
A-Alpha Bio Boosts the Performance of Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction Using NVIDIA BioNeMo on AWS
Recursion's SYCAMORE Trial Readout
QuantumPharm becomes Hong Kong's third-largest IPO of 2024 after pricing shares at HK$5.28
Eli Lilly Joins Forces with AI Startup Genetic Leap in $409M Deal Centered Around RNA-Targeted Drug Discovery
Heart disease is the world’s biggest killer — this Cambridge Uni spinout is using AI to find new treatments
Chai Discovery, an AI biology startup founded six months ago, has raised nearly $30M from heavyweights Thrive Capital and OpenAI to bring AI to drug discovery
Longevity
BioAge Labs Inc Targeting Metabolic Aging
On September 3, 2024, the California-based biotech BioAge Labs (a Lilly, NYSE: LLY, partner) Filed for IPO to Advance its Obesity Candidate, an oral apelin receptor agonist azelaprag, past its Phase III STRIDES study and into a registrational Phase III trial. BioAge Labs is also offering its underwriters—Goldman Sachs, Citi, Jefferies and Morgan Stanley—a 30-day option to purchase additional shares of its common stock at the IPO price, minus discounts and commissions. Eventually, BioAge will trade on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol BIOA.
BioAge Labs is a longevity company building a pipeline of therapies to treat cardiometabolic diseases by targeting the biology of human aging. BioAge (launched in the US in 2015) paired up with Age Lab AS in August 2022 to tap into the latter firm’s biobank (containing tissue samples collected from healthy humans over many years), and with the help of ML and AI in addition to biobank sampling, they plan now to fuel the search for drug targets in longevity treatment (BioAge Partners With Age Labs to Decipher Healthy Longevity Using Samples and Data From a Preeminent Northern European Biobank).
The key features of their discovery platform are longitudinal omics coupled with serial functional assessments allowing modeling of aging-related progressive physical, cognitive, functional decline and healthspan trajectories captured by starting with healthy individuals. The AI platform offers: Target ID (Bespoke data science ecosystem with AI and ML-enabled insights from their human aging cohorts), Target validation (In-house translational aging core in naturally aged mice) and Discovery & Development (Expertise across discovery and development with a tech-forward approach).
In their pipeline you can find the following assets:
Azelaprag (BGE-105), Apelin receptor APJ agonist, Lead indication: Obesity
Azelaprag is an apelin receptor APJ agonist that increases weight loss and improves body composition in combination with incretin drugs. Azelaprag mimics the activity of the exerkine apelin, a peptide that is released in response to exercise and can be administered orally or intravenously.
In preclinical results, Azelaprag increases overall weight loss and improves body composition co-administered with incretins: (2x weight loss vs. incretin alone) and restores body composition and function to that of lean controls.
Phase 1 clinical trials completed in 2019 (198 subjects who received the drug for up to 21 days) showed that BGE-105 had a tolerable safety profile, with acceptable pharmacokinetics supporting once-daily administration.
On April 14, 2021, BioAge Labs announced that it has entered into an exclusive worldwide license agreement with Amgen, Inc (NASDAQ: AMGN) to develop and commercialize Amgen’s clinical-stage APJ agonist, BGE-105 (named AMG 986 by Amgen), to ameliorate muscle aging. In older people, muscle aging causes loss of strength, mobility, and function, driving mortality and multiple age-related diseases and decreasing overall quality of life.
In clinical results, Azelaprag demonstrated significant muscle and metabolic benefits in a Phase1b study of older subjects at bedrest, with promotion of energy expenditure and muscle metabolism and prevention of muscle atrophy (BioAge Announces Positive Topline Results for BGE-105 in Phase 1b Clinical Trial Evaluating Muscle Atrophy in Older Volunteers at Bed Rest).
On October 26, 2023, BioAge Labs Announced Plans for Phase 2 Trial of First-in-Class Apelin Receptor Agonist BGE-105/Azelaprag Co-Administered With Tirzepatide for Treatment of Obesity, in Collaboration With Lilly’s Chorus Organization. As part of the collaboration, Lilly will supply tirzepatide, Chorus will provide clinical trial design and execution expertise and BioAge will retain worldwide exclusive rights to develop and commercialize azelaprag for all indications. Chorus is a small, operationally independent clinical development organization within Eli Lilly and Company that specializes in drug development (A decade of innovation in pharmaceutical R&D: the Chorus model).
📣 On July 29, 2024, BioAge Labs announced that the first patient has been dosed in the STRIDES Phase 2 clinical trial evaluating BioAge’s lead product candidate azelaprag in combination with tirzepatide for the treatment of obesity in adults aged 55 and older (BioAge Announces First Patient Dosed in the STRIDES Phase 2 Clinical Trial Evaluating Azelaprag as a Novel Treatment for Obesity in Combination with Tirzepatide). STRIDES is being conducted in collaboration with Lilly’s Chorus clinical development organization.
The ongoing STRIDES clinical trial will assess azelaprag in combination with tirzepatide, marketed as Zepbound by Eli Lilly And Co, with topline results anticipated in the third quarter of 2025.
Moreover, a second Phase 2 trial will assess azelaprag in combination with semaglutide, marketed as Wegovy by Novo Nordisk A/S (CPH: NOVO-B), with initiation expected in the first half of 2025.
Regarding AI Drug Discovery news, Novo Nordisk A/S (Nasdaq Copenhagen: NOVO B, NYSE: NVO) is involved also in the following projects:
🏏 The foundation behind Ozempic maker, Novo Nordisk, is funding an Nvidia-backed AI supercomputer project. The Novo Nordisk Foundation choosed Eviden to build “Gefion” in Denmark, one of the world’s most powerful AI supercomputers.
🏏 On January 2, 2024, Novo Nordisk confirmed that is planning to open an AI research facility in London, UK, as part of a drive to place the technology at the heart of its drug discovery operations.
🏏 On January 4, 2024, Novo Nordisk and Cellarity announced the expansion of their research collaborations that aims to unravel novel biological drivers of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) that will leverage Cellarity’s platform to develop a small molecule therapy against this disease.
Cellarity—funded in 2017 in Flagship Labs (Flagship's innovation foundry) by Noubar Afeyan and Avak Kahvejian—has developed a broad platform harnessing single-cell technologies and ML to unveil the network state of a given cell, defining the cell's behavior. At Cellarity, they focus on the whole cell because, most often, a disease isn’t driven by one mechanism or protein, accordingly they use single-cell technologies to identify the cellular drivers of the transition from health to disease and then apply DL models to create drugs that reverse disease at the cellular level.
🏏 On May 9, 2024, Metaphore Biotechnologies announced a collaboration with Novo Nordisk to develop up to two next-generation therapeutics for obesity management. Metaphore is also a Flagship-founded biotechnology company designing novel therapeutics by combining ML and molecular mimicry.
Metaphores’s MIMIC platform is capable of mimicking the interactions between molecules with exquisite accuracy by capturing their natural dynamics at the point of interface.
🏏 In 2023, Insilico and Novo Nordisk signed a collaboration agreement that will help the Danish pharma identify targets against liver fibrosis. Novo Nordisk will utilize Insilico’s AI target discovery engine, PandaOmics, in conjunction with its own drug research and development expertise, to yield new target hypotheses of interest to Novo Nordisk.
🏏 In 2023, Novo Nordisk partnered with Eleven Therapeutics to identify new molecules that promote the precise delivery of RNA-based therapies. The collaboration will be focused on cardiometabolic diseases.
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.
🏏 Novo Nordisk announced also a partnership with Valo Health Inc., a company specializing in AI-powered drug discovery and development, for new cardiometabolic drug programs (“Novo Nordisk partners with Valo Health on AI drug discovery”).
Valo founded by David Berry in early 2019 is applying AI to human data, reducing the cost and time of drug development while increasing confidence the medicines will work. Founded by Flagship Pioneering Valo Health has a revolutionary, integrated drug discovery and development platform, the Opal platform, a fully unified, end-to-end integrated platform with applications across the entire drug discovery and development process.
🏏 Finally, just this week Pepper Bio announced a collaboration to increase understanding of healthy muscle growth with Novo Nordisk’s Bio Innovation Hub through its Co-Creation Greenhouse Program.
Pepper Bio founded in 2018 in US by Jon (Yu) Hu (CEO & co-Founder, MBA, Harvard Business School) and Samantha Dale Strasser (CSO & co-Founder, PhD, MIT) is a transomics company integrating phosphoproteomics, proteomics, transcriptomics and genomics, in a whole-stack solution 🕸️ for drug and biomarker discovery. By fully stacking and integrating these four layers, researchers have a complete, real-time map of what happens in cells before and during disease.
Let’s move back now to BioAge’s pipeline.
BGE-100, NLRP3 inhibitor, Metabolic Disease & Neuroinflammation, IND-enabling
NLRP3 is a critical component of the inflammasome. However, chronic inflammasome activation leads to pathologic inflammation that drives a vast number of immunologic and fibrotic disorders.
Analysis of BioAge’s proprietary longitudinal human aging cohorts revealed that NLRP3 levels rise with age and are associated with all-cause mortality.
BioAge has discovered a family of chemically novel NLRP3 inhibitors and BGE-100 is their most advanced program. It is both potent and highly brain penetrant, with potential to address a range of metabolic and neuroinflammatory conditions. And
Discovery, Undisclosed programs in metabolic syndromes.
Additionally, on April 29, 2020 BioAge Labs announced that it has entered into an exclusive worldwide license agreement with Taisho Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd to develop and commercialize Taisho's clinical-stage Hypoxia-inducible factor-prolyl hydroxylase (HIF-PH) inhibitor, BGE-117 (named TS-143 by Taisho), to ameliorate multiple diseases of aging (Study to Evaluate Efficacy and Safety of BGE-117 in the Treatment of Anemia of Aging: NCT04815603). BGE-117 can potentially treat multiple diseases of aging through the activation of HIF-1 target genes that are involved in numerous biological processes including tissue regeneration, erythropoiesis, glycolysis, glucose uptake, vascular remodeling and angiogenesis. Inhibition of HIF-PH increases HIF pathway activation and has the potential to increase resilience, repair and regeneration across multiple body systems.
Before the IPO (BioAge Labs, Inc. is seeking $100 million in an IPO to fund its clinical trials for obesity and insulin sensitivity treatments), BioAge had raised over $300M from premier investors. In particular, on February 13, 2024 BioAge Announced a $170 Million Oversubscribed Series D Financing to Accelerate Development of Obesity and Metabolic Disease Therapeutics, led by Sofinnova Investments. New investors including Longitude Capital, RA Capital, Cormorant Asset Management, RTW Investments, SV Health Investors, OrbiMed Advisors, Sands Capital, Pivotal bioVenture Partners, Osage University Partners, Lilly Ventures, and Amgen Ventures also participated in the round alongside existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health.
Finally on August 22, 2024, BioAge Labs announced the appointment of Jean-Pierre Garnier, PhD, as Chair of the company’s Board of Directors. Garnier will succeed current Board Chair James Healy, MD, PhD, managing partner of Sofinnova Investments, who will remain on the Board. Garnier served as the Chief Executive Officer of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) from 2000 to 2008, overseeing the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham. The CEO of BioAge (and co-founder) is Kristen Fortney.
For more about Anti-Aging Therapies 👇
Certified Plasmids: Fighting Data Reproducibility Crisis and Cyberbiosecurity Threats
GenoFab Inc
GenoFAB (2019, US) leverages the power of automation to increase the productivity of R&D in biotechnology, by partnering with biotechnology companies and life scientists who need certified 🔏 gene delivery solutions. To do so, GenoFab integrates engineering and data science to deliver custom gene delivery solutions that meet its clients projects unique requirements by offering:
Designing and assembling of libraries of sequence-verified ✔️🆔 gene delivery vectors derived from libraries of genetic parts and design rules. GenoFAB's biofoundry technology can produce large libraries of vector candidates to optimize vector performance rationally.
GenoFAB Biofoundry OS is a patent-pending software that supports the development of new gene delivery solutions using an iterative product development process. It integrates all the steps of an R&D project with the end game in mind (inventory, sequencing, analytics, workflows).
Whole plasmid sequencing 🔡 of existing plasmids or plasmids developed by GenoFAB. GenoFAB sequencing workflow strives to minimize sequencing errors by combining short-read data from Illumina (ILMN) and long-read data from Oxford Nanopore (ONT). Short and long reads are analyzed using their hybrid assembly algorithm.
Testing vector libraries in vitro 🧫 🧪 by transfection in cell cultures then measuring gene expression using fluorescence microscopy, mass spectrometry, flow cytometry, real-time qPCR and other assays. The in vitro testing generates large sets of high-quality data suitable for ML or AI analysis.
Offering Plasmid Certification 🏅: The GenoFAB Standard Identification Number (GSIN) is a cryptographic technology used to secure the distribution of plasmids encoding gene delivery vectors. Inserting a GSIN digital certificate in the plasmids allows business partners to verify the plasmid's integrity and authenticity and retrieve the plasmid documentation.
Data Analysis 🧮: Statistical analysis of their clients testing data to identify sources of variation. Predictive ML models to guide experiment and prioritize plasmids for testing.
Jean Peccoud founded GenoFAB wanting to improve the reproducibility of drug development programs. Low reproducibility rates within life science research undermine cumulative knowledge production and contribute to both delays and costs of therapeutic drug development. An analysis of past studies indicated that the cumulative (total) prevalence of irreproducible preclinical research exceeds 50%, resulting in approximately US $28,000,000,000 (US$28B) per year spent on preclinical research that is not reproducible, in the United States alone!
Moreover, so far more than 70% of all researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments!
But Dr. Peccoud is interested also in cyberbiosecurity threats that can emerge at the interface between biological space and cyberspace.
Recently, Peccoud’s team built a plasmid that included a 12kb computer-generated DNA sequence. When they compared this sequence to content in the GenBank database, the BLAST search algorithm did not return anything because the computer-generated sequence did not have any homology to any biological sequence.
“Is that really the right way to look at it?” Peccoud posed.
“If you have 12kb of DNA sequences in a plasmid and you have absolutely no information about that, that's the one that you should actually be losing sleep over.”
Biotechs Bolster Biosecurity to Safeguard the Future of Nucleic Acid Sequencing
Today, Dr. Peccoud is the Abell Chair in Synthetic Biology in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU) and he leads the Colorado Cyberbiofoundry, a high-throughput facility to accelerate the development of new viral vectors and other gene delivery systems for biomedical applications. Moreover, since 2008 Dr. Peccoud has advised the U.S. Department of Defense and members of the intelligence community to help them anticipate and manage cyberbiosecurity threats emerging at the interface between biological space and cyberspace.
GenoFAB started as a research project, the GenoCAD, funded from the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2009 to 2013, that covered the development of the GenoCAD software and maintenance of its underlying infrastructure (Virginia Bioinformatics Institute-developed synthetic biology tool transitions to private sector).
For more about the reproducibility crisis in biology:
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AI Drug Discovery in South Korea
Syntekabio
Last week (September 6, 2024) Syntekabio announced its participation at the BioTechX USA event, being held on September 17-18, 2024 in Philadelphia, PA where it will give an in-depth talk on its AI-driven solutions for drug discovery.
Syntekabio (KOSDAQ: 226330) (2009, South Korea) is a global partner for AI drug discovery and repurposing drugs (AI Drug Repurposing: source, source), using DeepMatcher, an AI drug development platform that combines new drug development technology and big data (such as biomarkers for individual cancer drug screening and disease susceptibility by immunotyping, pharmacogenomic typing, and predicting multi-omics information-based drug adverse effects, etc).
The DeepMatcher is a compound-protein interaction (CPI) prediction platform that offers a unique opportunity to accelerate hit discovery, hit-to-lead, and lead optimization processes, based on their proprietary biophysics-informed DL and large chemical spaces. So far, DeepMatcher has been successfully applied across protein families such as kinases, G protein coupled receptors (GPCR) and nuclear receptors and is also used for: Small Molecules Discovery, Neoantigens, Cell Therapies, Antibody Discovery, Drug Repurposing, Combination Therapy and Clinical Genomic Analysis.
So far, the company has functionally segmented the entire process of AI drug development and clinical genomics analysis into step-by-step modules and has created the "Cloud-SaaS” service applying Cloud supercomputing automation processes.
At the BioTechX event (schedule a meeting by clicking here) Syntekabio will be discussing how their AI-driven technologies can improve and accelerate their R&D activities for:
Addressing Data Scarcity in Drug Discovery with Physics-based AI Models
Jonathan Witztum, PhD, CTO, Syntekabio USA and
Flexible Molecular Docking for Neoantigen & Antibody Drug Prediction; Pre-Clinical Application
Jongsun Jung, PhD, CEO, Syntekabio.
Additionally, during the event the company will highlight its two novel in silico biologics platforms, Neo-ARSTM and Ab-ARSTM, for personalized or universal neoantigen cancer vaccine and novel antibody drug prediction, respectively.
Moreover, Syntekabio's AI can access over 10 billion known compounds as well as 1,400 in vitro/in vivo compatible drug targets covering over 70% of human diseases. This technology is powered by Syntekabio's AI Bio-Supercom Center, which houses an immense infrastructure of 5,000 servers (as of Q1 2024), 40,000 CPU cores and 2,500 GPUs fueling the company's algorithms. The ABS Center, a crucial resource for drug development, integrating supercomputing and AI systems to enable highly precise simulations and modeling in drug development, opened in October 2023 and currently is producing AI drug candidate material on a factory-wide scale.
On July 31, 2023, Syntekabio signed a MoU with Metaclipse Therapeutics, a USA based biotechnology company developing immunotherapies for cancer and vaccines for infectious disease, for joint research on development of a personalized immunotherapy for cancer. On August 31, 2023, Syntekabio announced that it has signed another MoU this time with POLARISqb, a drug discovery company that utilizes the optimization power of quantum computing, in order to combine the companies’ vanguard drug research platforms.
📌 POLARISqb is the first company in the world to develop a drug discovery engine that utilizes the optimisation power of quantum computing to search unstructured, exponentially large datasets in order to explore novel chemical space, and create new drugs.
At the heart of Polarisqb (Polaris Quantum Biotech) technology is their revolutionary and agile Tachyontm drug design platform, used for executing distributed molecular design work across the cloud, and managed by an automated process that allows the Polarisqb platform to search immense chemical libraries while also scaling up to execute multiple parallel projects simultaneously. By developing proprietary software for quantum systems that designs molecular assets faster and with a higher quality than anyone else, Polarisqb is able to deliver novel drug leads in a fraction of the timeline and cost of current drug development processes.
On top of that, in June 2023 Syntekabio expanded in the US by partnering up with a US clinical research organization (Target Health) to enter the world’s largest market for drug development.
On June 20, 2024, Syntekabio announced the signing of a strategic MoU with the global therapeutics licensing and PR platform company, bioSeedin (a subsidiary of ACROBiosystems) to leverage bioSeedin’s global network for the promotion of Syntekabio's AI drug active compound database, STB LaunchPad, as well as its AI-driven drug discovery technologies.
LaunchPad is a list of disease-specific drug candidates obtained in advance by DeepMatcher. Customers can select drugs by disease and target according to their stage of development and Syntekabio provides various AI solutions to rapidly develop the candidate drugs into therapeutics through step-by-step customized consulting and optimization.
Moreover, Syntekabio's Develop Now, Pay Later model enables pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to test the validity of a target protein of interest without incurring any upfront costs. Should a project demonstrate viability, Syntekabio then employs its STB LaunchPad program, powered by its proprietary AI-driven DeepMatcher technology platform, to deliver hits and optimized leads as well as IND-enabled candidates.
Syntekabio has raised a total of $33.5M. Their latest funding was raised on Apr 3, 2024 from a Post-IPO Equity round (Syntekabio Secures KRW 10B for AI Drug Development from Korea Investment Partners).
For more: