Weekly TechBio News
Latest Trends on TechBio: 👾 Axcelead and Japan, 👾 BioKnow, 👾 PhnyX Lab Startup and Korea, 👾 Conduit and Sarborg, 👾 GeneDx, 👾 Insilico Medicine, 👾 BenevolentAI, 👾 Valo Health AND MANY MORE
Welcome back to another edition of MetaphysicalCells and Happy New Year! 🌿🌻🐚🌀🌎🐟🌬️
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
By Albert Einstein
👾 Axcelead Drug Discovery Partners, Inc
On December 25, 2024, Axcelead Drug Discovery Partners, Inc (HQ: Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan) announced that it has entered into a drug discovery service agreement with Astellas Pharma, Inc (HQ: Chuo-Ku, Tokyo, Japan) to explore new candidate compounds for targeted protein degraders (Axcelead DDP Enters into Drug Discovery Service Agreement with Astellas for Targeted Protein Degraders). Under the agreement, Axcelead DDP will support Astellas’ targeted protein degrader discovery utilizing the DegLeadTM platform and will contribute to the generation of breakthrough new drug candidate compounds.
Axcelead DDP (formed in 2017 as a Takeda spin-out) is Japan’s first drug discovery solution provider inheriting the drug discovery platform from Takeda Pharmaceutical for screening, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology/biology, DMPK and safety research functions, all combined with the most advanced AI capabilities. By leveraging these strengths, Axcelead DDP provides solutions to various challenges faced in the process from exploratory research to clinical in drug discovery.
Axcelead DDP focuses on targeted protein degradation as the next generation of small-molecule drug discovery and provides an integrated service solution called DegLeadTM platform to solve various challenges in targeted protein degrader discovery, including synthetic technologies for rapid generation of targeted protein degraders, compound libraries, diverse high-throughput screening systems and profiling assay systems.
Apart from Axcelead, Astella also has several other TechBio/ AI Drug Discovery collaborations. 👇
Astellas Pharma Inc (TYO: 4503) and AI Drug Discovery
Astellas Pharma Inc is a Japanese multinational pharmaceutical company, formed on 1 April 2005 from the merger of Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd and Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Astellas has been driving forward digital transformation initiatives throughout its value chain, combining the capabilities of AI and robots with the skills and experience of people, and creating a state-of-the-art drug discovery platform that enables the development of high-quality drugs in a shorter time (A Human-in-the-Loop Drug Discovery Platform Integrating Humans, AI, and Robots).
On April 22, 2024, Takeda, Astellas and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking (a subsidiary of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Inc) Announced a Master Agreement to Establish Joint Venture Company. The new company will be dedicated to the incubation of early drug discovery programs, primarily originating from Japan and toward the creation of innovative therapeutics.
On January 23, 2024, Vivtex Corporation, a biotech company aiming to transform the development of oral biologic therapies for major diseases, announced that it has entered a research collaboration with Astellas, focused on the evaluation of Vivtex’s unique and proprietary GI-ORIS™ (“Gut on a chip” and AI) screening and formulation platform technology to support the development of novel, oral versions of a therapeutic candidate provided by Astellas.
On November 17, 2023, the Japan-based University of Tsukuba and Astellas announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the digitalization of the drug discovery research field, as well as the development of the life science ecosystem in Tsukuba and Kashiwa-no-ha, and to further accelerate innovative drug discovery research and development (medicine, biotechnology and AI/digital analytics).
On March 30, 2023, Xyphos Biosciences, Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of Astellas Pharma Inc, and IPA announced a research collaboration and exclusive option license agreement, to jointly conduct research activities to identify and optimize proprietary LENSᵃⁱ in silico generated antibodies, targeting an undisclosed target in the tumor microenvironment (TME), as potential therapeutic development candidates. Targeting this molecule has the potential to markedly enhance anti-tumor immunity with other Astellas therapies including chimeric antigen receptor-based (CAR) technologies. Astellas will have the exclusive option to license any development candidates generated as part of the collaboration (ImmunoPrecise’s Subsidiary Talem Enters into Exclusive Research Collaboration and License Option Agreement with Astellas). For more about Xyphos and IPA:
In 2021, Astellas signed an option and licence agreement with Dyno Therapeutics to develop AAV gene therapy vectors for skeletal and cardiac muscle, in order to utilize its CapsidMap platform (which uses AI to rapidly optimize AAV capsids) for delivery across multiple organs, while Astellas will conduct preclinical, clinical and marketing activities and also produce gene therapy product candidates using the capsids.
In 2020, Astellas acquired the UK based Nanna Therapeutics for €80M to boost the development of anti-aging drugs. Through this deal, Astellas gained access to Nanna’s drug discovery technology—which focuses on drugs that target the mitochondria—developing a treatment for a genetic syndrome called "mitochondrial encephalopathy, lactic acidosis and stroke-like episodes", or MELAS (caused by a change in one of several genes that help build mitochondria, cell structures that convert food into energy). Nanna’s microfluidics-based drug discovery technology was a big attraction for Astellas, since with this high-throughput platform, Nanna can generate, screen and acquire data on billions of small molecules in parallel, producing drug candidates in a matter of months rather than the years it typically takes.
Let's move to Japan 🎎🎴 now.
Japan and AI Drug Discovery
Another company (which recently expanded in Japan) that I haven’t talked a lot about, is FRONTEO Inc from Korea, an AI-solutions company with its headquarters in Tokyo, that has developed a natural language processing (NLP) model that adds a critical parameter—context—to the AI-powered analysis of research literature. FRONTEO’s flagship AI engine, KIBIT, uses the distributional hypothesis to analyze word relationships in written texts and Toyoshiba is leading the initiative to explore KIBIT’s use in drug discovery. Apart KIBIT, FRONTEO also utilizes the in-house developed AI engines "Concept Encoder" and "Looca Cross" that specialize in NLP to extract meaningful and important information from a huge amount of text data. Since its establishment in August 2003, FRONTEO has been expanding globally to Japan, the United States, South Korea and Taiwan.
On October 1, 2024, D-Wave And Japan Tobacco Collaborated On Quantum AI-Driven Drug Discovery To Accelerate Pharmaceutical Innovation. D-Wave Quantum Inc (NYSE: QBTS) and Japan Tobacco’s (JT) pharmaceutical division have announced a joint proof-of-concept project to use quantum computing and AI for drug discovery, specifically in the “Quantum AI-driven Drug Discovery” process. Following the proof-of-concept, JT plans to further develop these Quantum AI-driven systems and integrate quantum computing into production operations for future drug discovery.
Supported by D-Wave's team of professional services experts, the AI team in JT’s pharmaceutical division will utilize D-Wave's annealing quantum computing solutions as accelerators in the speed and quality of training JT’s novel AI-driven analysis systems, aiming to extend the applicable range of such AI systems in the AI-driven Drug Design.
D-Wave Quantum Inc is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software and services, and is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers—and the only company building both annealing quantum computers and gate-model quantum computers. D-Wave’s technology has been used by some of the world’s most advanced organizations including Mastercard, Deloitte, Davidson Technologies, ArcelorMittal, Siemens Healthineers, Unisys, NEC Corporation, Pattison Food Group Ltd., DENSO, Lockheed Martin, Forschungszentrum Jülich, University of Southern California, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
For more about Japan’s AI Drug Discovery efforts:
Boltz-1: A new open-source AI tool for drug discovery
MIT’s new open-source AI model, Boltz-1, could transform drug discovery by accurately predicting protein structures, offering global access to researchers.
