AI drug discovery

Xaira Therapeutics, an AI-driven biotechnology startup that emerged earlier this year with a $1 billion funding round, continues to demonstrate its ambitions and staying power. Despite recent biotech industry turbulence, with some AI-focused biotech firms announcing layoffs and restructuring, Xaira has doubled down on growth. The firm is bolstering its leadership roster while announcing a…

The global AI drug discovery market, valued around $1 to $1.7 billion in 2023, will be worth a multiple of that by the decade’s end. Analysts project the sector could be worth $9 billion or more. 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Recipients: David Baker Demis Hassabis John Jumper Achievement: Computational protein design and structure prediction…

While many AI companies focus on analyzing existing scientific literature, this approach faces a fundamental challenge: the reliability of the source material itself. “Up to 70% of experiments described in publications cannot be replicated,” notes Yochi Slonim, CEO of Anima Biotech. “You do it once and you publish it. You do it again, it doesn’t…

Athos Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotech focused primarily on developing precision small molecule therapeutics for autoimmune diseases and chronic inflammatory diseases. Like a growing number of biotechs, Athos is giving machine learning a prominent role in its drug discovery approach. Its advanced AI/ML platform integrates patient samples and data from global hospital systems to identify…

Deep Genomics, a Toronto-based techbio company founded in 2014, recently opened a new office and lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an expansion of its Toronto office, and several leadership hires. The company, which has more than 100 employees with a background in areas spanning AI, automation, molecular biology, clinical development and software engineering, aims to develop…

While there are currently no FDA-approved AI-discovered drugs, interest in generative AI (genAI) could be a game-changer for the pharmaceutical industry in the coming years. Sanofi, which has signaled its intent to go “all in” on AI, has inked a deal with ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Formation Bio to build AI-powered software to speed drug…

Is aging a disease or a natural process? That question has emerged as a point of debate among researchers, medical professionals and philosophers. Some, like biogerontologist David Gems, argue that lines between aging and disease are frequently blurry, and that intervening in the aging process “protects against the totality of age-related diseases.” Other researchers such…

The same week that BenevolentAI announced it was cutting 30% of its staff, AI-focused biotech Xaira Therapeutics debuted with a $1 billion funding round with little precedent in healthcare over the past year — or beyond that. A survey of the biggest fundraising rounds over the past year revealed that the absolute largest investments were…

Three-quarters of IT decision-makers at pharmaceutical companies plan to invest from $500,000 to $5 million in AI this year which, for many, doubles their budgets over the past year. That’s one of the findings based on the cross-industry research report involving 1,400 IT decision makers from Rackspace and AWS. “In terms of AI adoption, almost…

We can design chips that power self-driving cars and create physically-realistic video footage based on text descriptions. Yet, as Genentech’s Aviv Regev pointed out in a session about the company’s lab in the loop at NVIDIA’s GTC conference, the humble cells within us operate with a complexity that still eludes our full understanding. It turns out that a cell is itself like a computational device…

A collaboration between the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO), and NVIDIA will establish a national AI Innovation Centre in Denmark focused on accelerating research and innovation in fields including healthcare, life science, and quantum computing. The initiative is led on the Danish side by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which…

Lantern Pharma’s AI-powered sprint  Lantern Pharma (NASDAQ: LTRN), a publicly traded clinical-stage biotech company with a market cap of around $79 million as of mid-March 2024, is shooting for developing $200 million drugs with a machine learning-based platform. The oncology-focused firm Lantern Pharma, profiled last year, has advanced its new drug (LP-284) to a Phase…

The pharmaceutical industry is at a critical juncture: AI and other technological advances offer unprecedented potential, yet the cost of developing new drugs has ballooned for decades, surpassing $2 billion in recent years with the projected return on investment (ROI) falling to a mere 1.2% in 2022, according to Deloitte. Another dimension of the problem…

Two out of three pharma companies (67%) plan to ramp up investment in IT, including AI, over the next 12 months, according to a survey from the cloud vendor Rackspace Technology and Dell/VMware conducted in October 2023. About the same amount, 68%, reported challenges in recruiting and hiring talent skilled in cloud and AI technology.…

Capping off a busy 2023, Insilico Medicine has announced a potentially first-in-class oral PHD inhibitor for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). ISM5411 is the fifth AI-backed drug candidate from Insilico Medicine to reach clinical stages. ISM5411 targets prolyl hydroxylase domain (PHD) enzymes via modulation of the hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) pathway, which is involved…

As the year draws to a close, it is clear that molecular science and diagnostics is the hottest funding area in the biotech industry. In an analysis of 50 of the best-funded biotechs of 2023 focused on human health, molecular and science and diagnostics startups collectively attracting roughly $945 million, dwarfing the figures in other…

The clinical-stage company Verseon (Fremont, California) is unique among companies exploring the use of AI in drug discovery given its focus on what it calls the “uncharted” chemical space. While Big Pharma companies typically test compounds from their collections for specific diseases, these collections often have constraints and overlapping compounds. Adityo Prakash, CEO of Verseon,…

“Can we treat chronic inflammation in ulcerative colitis by reversing immune cell activation in colonic mucosa?” That’s an example of a biological question that the AI-enabled drug discovery firm BenevolentAI (AMS:BAI) would ask when exploring a new drug target. Incorporating a disease, sign, mechanism and tissue into a single question provides focal points for the…

An international group of researchers employed DeepMind’s deep learning-driven AlphaFold protein structure database to design and synthesize a potential hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) drug in only 30 days. The AI drug discovery project consisted of Insilico Medicine, the University of Toronto’s Acceleration Consortium and researchers including Nobel laureate Michael Levitt. The team applied AlphaFold to Insilico’s…