Crown Bioscience and Turbine Partner to Integrate AI-Driven Drug Discovery with Organoid Validation Platform
Key Insights
Crown Bioscience (search) and Turbine (search) announced a strategic partnership to advance translational oncology (search) research by integrating AI-driven Virtual Assays with tumor organoid validation platforms.
The collaboration creates a closed-loop approach that simulates biological responses across thousands of samples and hundreds of drugs to improve predictive accuracy and reduce experimental burden.
This integrated workflow enables researchers to generate insights earlier, streamline experimental design, and make faster decisions with greater confidence in clinical translatability.
Crown Bioscience (search), a global contract research organization and JSR Life Sciences (search) company, has announced a strategic partnership with Turbine (search), a leading virtual biology company, to advance translational oncology (search) research through an integrated AI-driven drug discovery platform. The collaboration combines Turbine's in silico Virtual Assays with Crown Bioscience's Tumor Organoid Assays based on HUB Organoid Technology, establishing a connected workflow that enables researchers to move more efficiently from hypothesis to validation.
AI-Powered Drug Discovery Platform
Turbine (search)'s Virtual Assays simulate biological responses across thousands of biological samples and hundreds of drugs, generating predictive insights to identify and prioritize targets, therapies, and combinations. The predictions will be enhanced through the incorporation of multimodal and drug response data from hundreds of tumor organoid models at Crown Bioscience (search). This integration creates a closed-loop approach linking prediction with validation, improving predictive accuracy, reducing experimental burden, while delivering greater biological relevance and translational confidence.
The workflow enables researchers guided by Turbine (search)'s in silico predictions to experimentally validate select hypotheses using Crown Bioscience (search)'s tumor organoid assays. This approach streamlines experimental design, reduces costs, and shortens development timelines by allowing researchers to generate insights earlier, focus resources on the most promising strategies, and make faster, more informed decisions with greater confidence in clinical translatability.
Addressing Translational Challenges
"Translational success depends on how well early insights reflect real patient biology," said John Gu, CEO of Crown Bioscience (search). "By integrating predictive modeling with our organoid models, we are creating a more robust foundation for decision-making, one that improves confidence, reduces risk, and accelerates the path to the clinic."
Szabolcs Nagy, CEO of Turbine (search), emphasized the partnership's potential to resolve a fundamental challenge in drug discovery. "Together with Crown Bioscience (search), we aim to address a key trade-off in drug discovery between scale and translatability," Nagy said. "Using our Virtual Lab, researchers can already explore millions of hypotheses in silico. By integrating with Crown's organoid platform, we enable virtual experimentation that better reflects patient biology, helping close the translatability gap."
Platform Capabilities and Infrastructure
Crown Bioscience (search) operates as a global contract research organization dedicated to accelerating drug discovery and development in oncology (search) and immuno-oncology. The company maintains the world's largest commercially available patient-derived xenograft collection and approximately 1,000 tumor organoid models powered by Hubrecht Organoid Technology, offering insights across 35 cancer (search) indications. The organization operates from 11 state-of-the-art facilities across the US, Europe, and APAC, with laboratories meeting industry standards including accreditation by the College of American Pathologists and the International Organization for Standardization.
Turbine (search) virtualizes biological experiments with AI to accelerate drug discovery and improve clinical translatability. Using its foundational virtual cell model powered by its lab-in-the-loop approach, Turbine creates virtual copies of experimental assays. The company's Virtual Lab runs experiments at computational speed and scale, allowing researchers to test millions of ideas beyond physical lab constraints to understand biological drivers of disease. Working with scientists at leading biopharma companies including MSD, AstraZeneca and Bayer (search), Turbine's virtual assays have rationalized experiments across more than 30 discovery programs.