Women Advancing AI Drug Discovery
"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." By Marie Curie 🌻
Welcome back to another edition of Metaphysical Cells on AI drug discovery and female leaders.
👉 From “Pioneering women in science history you really should know about” by Sara Rigby:
👒 Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA 🧬🧞♂️
In his 1968 book, The Double Helix, Watson outlined how the two had become friends while working together and he remarked that he would never have won a Nobel Prize or published a famous paper if it wasn’t for Rosalind.
👒 Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was the first female computer programmer 👩💻👩🏫
Lovelace's work on the Analytical Engine (the world’s first digital computer, with a store, a processor, a memory, a sub-routing function and all the other essential features of a modern digital computer) that has led to her being known as the first computer programmer, though Babbage (her friend and mentor that built the Analytical Engine) never saw her as more than an 'interpretress', as he called her, of his work.
👒 Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994) discovered the structure of insulin 📐📏
In 1964, Dorothy won the Nobel Prize 🏆 for Chemistry for “her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances”. She was only the third woman to have won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry after Marie Curie and her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie, and the fifth woman to win a science Nobel Prize.
👒 Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of jumping genes 🦘🧬
Her work was not immediately recognised, and jumping genes were considered junk 🗑️ DNA by much of the scientific community at the time. It was not until 1983, when she was awarded The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, that the scientific community began to recognise not only just how important these jumping genes are, but how much of the genome they make up - some estimates suggest they makes up 40 per cent of the human genome.
Women 👩🎓👩🏫👩🔬 in TechBio
👩🔬 Nadia Harhen, the leader of SandboxAQ's AQBioSim division
Just this week, after several years of stealth 🥷 development, SandboxAQ announced its biopharma molecular simulation division, AQBioSim, an in-silico platform for the simulation of molecular interactions using AI and quantum technologies.
In particular, @SandboxAQ has a proprietary Absolute Free Energy Perturbation (AQ-FEP) software in order to generate thousands of predictions of molecular interactions. Basically, at SandboxAQ they are developing highly effective strategies to scaleup the quantum chemical simulations they predict, by using massively parallel classical hardware including large scale linear algebra with TPUs, large scale DFT results and a Post-Hartree-Fock method called DMRG, allowing them to scaleup to unprecedented size. And by combining the accuracy of quantum mechanical equations with the speed and power of AI, they offer a suite for drug discovery for large-scale molecular dynamics simulations able to handle complex undruggable targets. For example, allowing to virtual screen more than 20,000 ligands per day!
"Our AQ-powered solutions accelerate the drug discovery and development process, mitigating its slow, complex, and error-prone nature. By shortening the discovery funnel, de-risking portfolios, and uncovering winning formulas earlier, we empower biopharma companies and research institutions to prioritize promising compounds, accelerate therapy development, extend patent lifetimes, drive revenue growth, and get cures to patients faster."
📢 By Nadia Harhen, the leader of the AQBioSim division
For more you can watch her interview on YouTube: How does quantum simulation help create new drugs?
In AQBioSim’s Scientific 🦉 Advisory Board you can find VIPs like:
Dr. Geoff Ling - CEO, OnDemand Pharmaceuticals, Professor of Neurology, Johns Hopkins, DARPA Biotech
Dr. Samir N Khleif - Immunologist, Oncologist, Drug Discovery, NIH, Georgetown, Georgiamune
Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee - Medical Oncology, Columbia
Dr. Steven Deitcher - CEO Bespoke Biotherapeutics
Dr. Mark Smith, PhD - Head of Medicinal Chemistry, Stanford, Sarafan ChEM-H, Roche
Dr. Ross Walker, PhD, HPC - Scientific Computing and Data Science, GSK, NVIDIA
Dr. Patricia Weber, PhD - SBDD expert
SandboxAQ, that spun off from Alphabet in 2022, is backed by T. Rowe Price, Guggenheim Partners, Eric Schmidt (chairman of SandboxAQ), Breyer Capital, Marc Benioff and other leading investors and has raised $500 million 💰 in a round of funding so far.
👩🔬 Alice Zhang CEO and co-founder of Verge Genomics
Verge Genomics (@VergeGenomics), founded in 2015 by Alice Zhang (an American, child of immigrants from China) and Jason Chen, has an end-to-end ConVERGE discovery platform that is a closed-loop ML system combining industry-leading proprietary human genomics with advanced computational tools, to predict new drugs with a higher probability of clinical success.
Verge Genomics is the first AI-enabled drug discovery company that discovered a novel target (the VRG50635 for investigational amyotrophic lateral sclerosis/ALS treatment) and developed it into a clinical candidate entirely in-house, in just four years.
"I just became very frustrated with the drug discovery process. It's largely a guessing game where companies are essentially brute force screening millions of drugs just to stumble across a single new drug that works."
📢 By Alice Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Verge Genomics
For more watch: 2019 Healthtech: Verge Genomics where Alice discusses how Verge Genomics is using ML to transform drug discovery.
On June 15, 2023, Verge Genomics announced the completion of the phase 1 clinical trial of VRG50635 in healthy adult volunteers, when was dosed up to the maximum single and repeated doses planned, demonstrating a favourable safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetic profile supportive of advancement into a proof-of-concept study in people with ALS. Detailed results 🗒️📝 from the study will be presented at the upcoming European Network to Cure ALS (ENCALS) 2023 meeting being held in Barcelona, Spain from July 12-14, 2023.
Moreover, Verge Genomics has collaborated with Emerald Innovations to deploy wireless digital health technology to gather vital patient data for its planned ALS trial with VRG50635. In particular, during the study Emerald’s wireless digital health sensors were placed in the homes of the participants to continuously measure key neurological functions affected by ALS, like sleeping, breathing, walking and mobility. Verge Genomics has raised a total of $134.1M.
👩🔬 Daphne Koller CEO and founder of Insitro
Daphne Koller, an Israeli-American computer scientist, and Andrew NG, a fellow Stanford computer science professor in the AI lab, founded Coursera in 2012. Daphne was then recognised for her contributions to online education by being named Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2012 and Fast Company's Most Creative People in 2014. When she left Coursera in 2016, she became chief computing officer at Calico and then in 2018 she left Calico to start and lead Insitro a drug discovery startup that operates an automated lab equipment running on algorithms that use its own in vitro disease models.
In particular, @insitro’s predictive models are grounded in human data (genetic, phenotypic and clinical data) using ML. Moreover, they combine patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), genome editing, high content cellular phenotyping and ML to build in vitro models of disease. The outcome is an integrated model of disease spanning in vitro cellular systems and in silico ML models—namely an insitro model that allows them to differentiate between cell states at much finer granularity and predict disease-relevant clinical traits.
“The world is noisy and messy. You need to deal with the noise and uncertainty.”
📢 By Daphne Koller
Insitro is on the list of the top 100 private deep tech companies who are commercialising scientific research into deep technology to make a significant impact on the world: The World's Top 100 Private Deep Tech Companies by XPRIZE and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Insitro has raised a total of $743M in funding over 4 rounds.
👩🔬 Loubna Bouarfa founder of OKRA.AI
On February 07, 2023, Envision Pharma Group (Envision), a global technology-enabled commercialisation integrated medical capabilities and solutions and data analytics partner to the life sciences industry, announced it has acquired OKRA.ai (@OKRATechAI), an award-winning technology company offering AI products and solutions for the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry.
OKRA.ai was founded in 2015 by Dr. Loubna Bouarfa a Dutch, Moroccan data scientist, assisting healthcare industry towards a data-driven decision-making by explainable AI. OKRA.ai’s AI platform curates and enhances a valuable data lake for insights generation and leverages advanced feature extraction algorithms to understand the characteristics that are critical for value creation. OKRA.ai predictions are delivered via robust, validated trained models, rather than rules-based systems. This is to maximise prediction accuracy and helps recognise the patterns and trends over time. The OKRA.ai brain, recommends actions and insights that are generated based on robust modelling, with explanations and reasons provided to explain the outputs, instilling trust in users. Since 2015, OKRA.ai has supported the commercialisation of 92 molecules, 67 indications and 13 pharmaceutical brands.
“Profit is now not only measured in terms of numbers, it’s also measured as how much we achieve in climate, health, and other factors. Having and orchestrating all those variables in your domain of expertise is very important and not only to be left to engineers that build AI-algorithms. It also has to drive the thinking-force from ethicists and economists and all the other disciplines to make a better world.”
📢 Said Dr Loubna Bouarfa at AI Lecture Series (#012 - Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century).
👉 From “14 outstanding 🔝👌 finalists in the running for the EU Prize for Women Innovators 2022” By European 🇪🇺Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA):
👗👩🔬 Rocío Arroyo (Spain 🇪🇸🥘) co-founder and CEO of AMADIX providing personalised medicine solutions for cancer diagnosis (a blood test that detects colorectal cancer years before its onset).
👗👩🏫 Dr Ciara Clancy (Ireland 🇮🇪☘️) founder and CEO of Beats Medical developing technology solutions (digital therapeutics based on physiotherapy) to tackle the mobility symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease.
👗👩💻 Dr Lorena Diéguez, Dr Sara Abalde-Cela and Paulina Piairo (Portugal 🇵🇹🐙) co-founders and respectively CEO, CTO and COO of RUBYnanomed developing a non-invasive cancer progression monitoring device (that isolates circulating tumour cells through liquid biopsy directly from whole blood samples).
👗🕵️♀️ Dr Mehak Mumtaz (Portugal 🇵🇹🐙) co-founder and COO of iLoF developing a breakthrough AI-platform to accelerate the future of personalised drug discovery and development (with a digital library of biomarkers and biological profiles enabling biotechs and pharmas to make clinical trials faster, cheaper and more patient-centric).
👩🔬 Elizabeth O’Day CEO and founder of Olaris
Olaris, founded in 2014 by Liz O’Day an American scientist and entrepreneur, is using metabolomics and ML to develop in vitro diagnostics that empower patients, providers and biopharma to pursue the most effective treatments. @OlarisBoR, is a precision medicine company using a patient's molecular makeup like blood biomarkers (DNA, RNA, protein, and metabolites), to guide individual health decisions by using its platform Olaris CEREBRO.
In 2022, Olaris and Thermo Fisher Scientific announced a partnership to evaluate the feasibility of ML and metabolomics–based diagnostic panel to assess risk of developing complications from over immunosuppression in kidney transplant recipients.
For more: Innovating for good: How biotech changemakers are leading the way - Elizabeth O'Day (Olaris)
👩🔬 Leila Pirhaji founder of ReviveMed
Leila Pirhaji is an Iranian computational biologist, CEO and founder of ReviveMed, a biotech company that started up in 2018. Leila Pirhaji built an AI-based tool for measuring tiny molecules in the body called metabolites, such as small molecules of glucose and cholesterol that offer crucial insights into disease, patient physiology and immune system activity.
But current platforms can only detect less than 5% of human metabolites, so hopefully the AI alternative developed by ReviveMed would be capable of identifying more than 10,000 metabolite signals per patient, providing 20 times more data than any other platform. @Revive_Med’s core technology is based on a network-based ML algorithm for integrative analysis of untargeted metabolomic data with other large-scale molecular information such as data from genes, proteins, drugs and diseases. The technology was developed at the Fraenkel lab at MIT Biological Engineering department, and published in Nature Methods. ReviveMed has a collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb.
“We are very excited about this opportunity to work alongside industry leaders on the Bristol Myers Squibb team. We are looking forward to discovering new biological insights through the use of artificial intelligence to characterize a large number of metabolites and integrate these data with other molecular datasets such as proteomics and genomics.”
📢 Said Dr. Leila Pirhaji
For more: The medical potential of AI and metabolites by biotech entrepreneur and TED Fellow Leila Pirhaji that shares her plan to build an AI-based network to characterise metabolite patterns, to better understand how a disease develops and discover more effective treatments.
👩🔬 Noor Shaker founder of GTN Ltd and Glamorous.AI, is now Senior Vice President & General Manager @X-Chem
Noor Shaker is a Syrian British entrepreneur and computer scientist who co-founded the AI drug discovery start-up Glamorous AI that was acquired by the US-based company X-Chem in Nov 2021, where Noor is now the Senior Vice President and General Manager. Before Glamorous AI, Noor founded the drug discovery start-up GTN that entered liquidation in March 2020.
@XChemInc is a leader in small molecule drug discovery and a DNA-encoded library (DEL) technology pioneer, that combines proven DEL and medicinal chemistry expertise with groundbreaking AI solutions. X-Chem’s proprietary ArtemisAI uses a suite of ML models paired with extensive DEL data to revolutionise the discovery of new medicines and realise the full potential of rich datasets. Moreover, X-Chem’s DEL technology is deployed for and by clients around the world as an important method of small molecule discovery. The libraries DELability, DELflex, DELcore and DELvalent offer target-based screening solutions and with the DELenable option, X_Chem can deliver support to help clients build internal DEL capabilities.
For more: AI: Cracking the Code of Drug Discovery: Noor Shaker / Founder, Glamorous AI
Until next time 🌻☀️🌞🌼,