Tagged News

AI-Driven Drug Discovery Accelerates with New Academic Alliance Targeting Protein Kinases

a year ago

The Lamarr Institute, b-it, and TüCAD2 have formed a collaborative alliance to accelerate drug discovery using artificial intelligence, focusing specifically on protein kinase inhibitors that could treat cancer, neurological disorders, and autoimmune diseases.
The partnership combines AI expertise in data analysis and machine learning from German research institutions with medicinal chemistry capabilities, utilizing the world's largest academic collection of 12,000 protein kinase inhibitors.
AI technologies are revolutionizing drug discovery by reducing development timelines from 10-15 years and costs reaching billions of dollars, with applications spanning virtual screening, toxicity prediction, and de novo drug design.
The collaboration emphasizes "Explainable AI" to ensure transparency and acceptance in medical applications, addressing the critical need for interpretable machine learning in pharmaceutical research.

a year ago

Xaira Therapeutics launched with $1 billion in funding from ARCH Venture Partners and other major investors, marking the largest initial commitment in ARCH's nearly 40-year history.
The company aims to leverage generative AI and foundational models from the University of Washington's Institute of Protein Design to create drugs that were previously impossible to develop.
Former Stanford president and Genentech CSO Marc Tessier-Lavigne leads the company as CEO, with investors expressing confidence despite his recent resignation from Stanford following research data manipulation allegations at his former lab.
The funding reflects growing industry investment in generative AI for drug discovery, with the technology showing potential to optimize every stage of pharmaceutical R&D from target discovery to commercialization.

2 years ago

Amphista Therapeutics achieved the first milestone in its second discovery programme with Bristol Myers Squibb, triggering a milestone payment under their strategic collaboration.
The achievement follows a previous milestone reached in May 2023 for the first discovery programme, demonstrating consistent progress across both active programmes.
The collaboration, valued at up to $1.25 billion in potential milestone payments, focuses on developing small molecule protein degraders using Amphista's EclipsysTM platform.
Amphista's targeted protein degradation approach shows potential for CNS penetration, expanding therapeutic applications beyond traditional modalities.

2 years ago

Insilico Medicine's INS018_055 becomes the first drug with both AI-discovered target and AI-generated design to reach Phase II clinical trials for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis treatment.
The drug development process took just 30 months from target discovery to Phase I trials, approximately half the time of traditional drug discovery methods.
IPF affects about 100,000 people in the U.S. and typically leads to death within 2-5 years if untreated, with current treatments only slowing disease progression.
The Phase II trial is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study over 12 weeks in China, with plans to expand to 60 subjects across 40 sites in the U.S. and China.

3 years ago

Lead Pharma and Oxeltis received an €800K EUREKA Eurostars grant to fund their three-year EPIGENEXT project developing a first-in-class small molecule therapy for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.
DLBCL affects approximately 115,000 people worldwide annually, with 30-50% of patients experiencing relapse after standard R-CHOP treatment and poor long-term survival rates.
The collaboration aims to address the significant unmet medical need in DLBCL treatment, where current chemotherapy approaches cause debilitating side effects and fail to cure nearly half of patients.

4 years ago

Amazon disclosed a $14.7 million investment in Nautilus Biotechnology, a pre-revenue company developing proteome measurement technology for drug discovery and clinical diagnostics.
Nautilus has built a prototype device that aims to measure more than 95% of the human proteome, compared to current mass spectrometers that only capture a small percentage of proteins.
The investment represents Amazon's continued expansion into healthcare following its $753 million PillPack acquisition and development of Amazon Care telehealth services.
Nautilus expects its first revenue in 2022 and has partnered with Roche-owned Genentech to use its proteome analysis system for research applications.