When Tech met Bio 💘 (2nd part)
When Tech met Bio 💘 (2nd part)
AI/ML Revolutionizing Drug Discovery
“The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.”
By Galileo Galilei
For the first part of this newsletter 👉 When Tech met Bio 💘.
❇️ News ❇️
🥦 The latest three-part webinar series, Genomics in Drug Discovery ONLINE by Front Line Genomics, will offer examples of how to best leverage AI/ML, genomic diversity and functional genomic tools to catapult your drug discovery efforts towards the clinic.
🥬 Lantern Pharma's A.I. Platform, RADR®, Surpasses 60 Billion Data Points – Anticipates Reaching 100 Billion Data Points in 2024, Paving the Way for Enhanced Cancer Therapy Innovations and Expedited Development Timelines
🥑 QIAGEN (QGEN) Launches AI-Driven Biomedical Knowledge Base
🫛 AI Supercomputers Revolutionizing Industries: From Drug Discovery to Financial Modeling
🫑 Leveraging generative AI to prioritize drug repurposing candidates for Alzheimer’s disease with real-world clinical validation
🌽 AI Predicts Drugs That Are Not Safe to Take Together
Owkin
Owkin (France/US, 2016) is a French-American full-stack AI biotech that identifies new treatments, optimizes clinical trials and develops diagnostics using histology slides and omics. They are offering:
📎 MOSAIC, a landmark research project to create a multimodal dataset with spatial transcriptomes from 7,000 patients in 7 cancer types. This is the largest spatial omics atlas to date.
📎 MSIntuit™ CRC is a CE-marked AI diagnostic that provides a prescreen approach for digital pathologists. MSIntuit is used for Microsatellite instability (MSI), a key genomic biomarker that plays an important role in the treatment of colorectal tumors (CRC) patients, from H&E/WSI (hematoxylin-eosin-safran-stained/whole slide images). On June 14, 2023, Owkin successfully validated MSIntuit™ CRC AI that is now integrated into clinical workflows via France's largest network of pathologists, the Medipath.
📎 RlapsRisk™ BC is an AI diagnostic tool to help pathologists and oncologists determine the right treatment pathway for early breast cancer patients.
RlapsRisk BC assesses the risk of distant relapse at 5 years of ER+/HER2- early invasive breast cancer patients, post surgery, from HES/WSI and clinical data.
On February 08, 2024, Owkin announced that they are working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform drug discovery, de-risk and accelerate clinical trials and develop AI diagnostics. More specifically, Owkin selected AWS as its primary cloud provider to develop generative AI applications and accelerate drug discovery and development. The company will leverage AWS’s scalable storage options, enhanced data security measures and robust computing capabilities to empower scientists and researchers to access, analyze, and manage vast amounts of data efficiently and securely in the cloud (TechBio Unicorn Owkin Teams Up with AWS to Advance Generative AI for Precision Medicine).
Owkin
is founder-led by Thomas Clozel, MD, Oncologist and Gilles Wainrib, PhD, Professor of ML,
is trusted by big biopharmas,
is first in class in AI diagnostics tools,
is well-funded with million dollars (a total of $304.1M) raised from leading biopharma companies (Sanofi & BMS) and venture funds (Fidelity, Google Ventures & BPI among others), and
just launched Bioptimus.
✴️ Bioptimus, the youngest child of Owkin ✴️
The chief R&D officer at Owkin Prof. Jean-Philippe Vert together with Eric Durand (SVP Data Science at Owkin), Rodolphe Jenatton, Felipe Llinares-López and David C. (Chief Solutions Officer at Owkin), just launched Bioptimus. A startup that will develop a “large-language model” (LLM), in order to build the first universal AI foundation model for biology to fuel breakthrough discoveries and accelerate innovations in biomedicine and beyond.
The French 🥐 startup was just launched with a seed funding of $35M, led by Sofinnova Partners, with Bpifrance Large Venture, and additional funding from top global technology VCs 🧚. In particular:
Sofinnova Partners is a leading European venture capital firm in life sciences, specializing in healthcare and sustainability. Based in Paris, London and Milan, Sofinnova Partners invests in companies from seed to late-stage. Founded in 1972, today Sofinnova Partners has over €2.5 billion under management. Managed by Antoine Papiernik, Henrijette Richter and Graziano Seghezzi in December, 2023, Sofinnova Partners unveiled Sofinnova.AI: A cutting-edge AI platform set to transform its life sciences investment practice. And
Bpifrance is the French Public Investment Bank. Large Venture, incepted in 2013, is the late-stage VC arm of Bpifrance, a €1.75 billion fund dedicated to fast-growing, highly innovative startups across three main sectors: healthtech and life sciences, digital and greentech.
The world-class team at Bioptimus, led by Professor Jean-Philippe Vert, brings together Google DeepMind alumni and Owkin experts.