9 Companies Using Artificial Intelligence to Fight Infectious Diseases
Development of a novel drug is a tedious process that requires immense investments of resources and time - on average, it takes at least ten years and $ 2.6 B for a new medicine to complete the journey from initial discovery to the marketplace. And then patents give pharmaceutical companies the right to be the sole supplier of a new drug in a certain country to make such time and efforts investments justified. But if we are talking about a rapidly developing new plague, time resources at the disposal of the pharmaceutical industry appear to be scarce and new solutions to emerging challenges have to be found faster.
For example, during the pandemics remdesivir and dexamethasone were shown to have efficiency in fighting COVID-19, but it led to supply shortages for both medicines. To avoid the collapse of drug supply chains, scientists at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Timothy Cernak and colleagues turned to Artificial Intelligence (AI). They used a commercial drug synthesis AI program Synthia to find the most efficient and cost-effective strategy for synthesizing medicines. Researchers programmed Synthia to look for new synthetic solutions for 12 medications that at the time were being tested as potential COVID-19 therapies. In 11 out of 12 cases Synthia was able to find novel synthesis solutions, and for one of the studied compounds, the software came up with 4 different synthetic strategies.
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What about other pathogens menacing the existence of the human race? In 2019, there were an estimated 4.95M deaths associated with bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019, including 1.27M deaths attributable to it. And as the response to this threat only 17 new systemic antibiotics have been approved by the FDA since 2010. Existing methods for screening new antimicrobials are very costly, require a significant time investment, and are usually limited to a narrow spectrum of chemical diversity. Scientists at MIT decided that Artificial Intelligence could give an answer to this issue. With the help of machine learning algorithms they have identified a powerful new antibiotic compound halicin. In laboratory tests, the drug killed many of the world’s most problematic disease-causing bacteria, including A. baumannii, a bacterium resistant to all known antibiotics that has infected many U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As you may witness, AI became a useful tool in fighting bacterial and viral infections. So here we have summarized the most interesting companies that are using artificial intelligence to develop antibiotic and antiviral therapies, listed in alphabetical order.
AbCellera
Headquartered in Vancouver, AbCellera is a privately held technology company with an antibody discovery platform that searches and analyzes natural immune systems to find antibodies that can be used to prevent and treat disease. AbCellera’s technology, which combines high-throughput microfluidics, hyper-scale data science, machine learning, bioinformatics, and genomics, identifies new drug candidates and aims to reduce the time it takes to bring treatments to the clinic. In 2018, AbCellera was one of four groups named to the pandemic response project at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The project was aiming to build a platform that could create field-ready antiviral within 60 days of isolating a virus.
Over its 8 year long existence AbCellera has partnered with Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, Pfizer and Eli Lilly, along with a list of smaller biotechs, including Denali, Harbour Biomed, and Autolus. The company acquired $371.2M in funding over 10 rounds, with the latest round happening in May 2020.
Anima Biotech
This New Jersey based company is advancing mRNA Lightning, a novel platform for the discovery of selective small molecule mRNA drugs and their mechanisms of action. Anima implements a differentiated approach that combines high scale automated phenotypic screening in live biology with AI mRNA image analysis. The high scale automation and integrated technologies in their platform enabled the company to develop a broad pipeline across 18 different discovery programs in various therapeutic areas - one of which is in infectious diseases (RSV viral proteins translation inhibitors). The company has established strategic collaborations with Pharma in partnered programs including one large scale collaborations with Lilly and Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
Atomwise
Established in Toronto in 2012, and later moved to San Francisco, Atomwise uses deep learning methods, including convolutional neural nets, to help discover new medicines via its proprietary algorithm AtomNet. This technology excels at understanding complex concepts as a combination of small pieces of information, which is differentiated from other techniques on the market by its ability to find and optimize novel chemical matter. The firm is engaged in numerous academic and industrial partnerships, one of which is vAirus, a joint venture aiming to use Atomwise’s AtomNet technology and Dr. Panganiban’s expertise in RNA viruses to develop broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. Up to now the company has raised over $176 million from leading venture capital firms to advance its mission
A2A Pharmaceuticals
A2A Pharmaceuticals was founded in 2016 in the US, and since then the company has been designing computationally optimized small molecule therapeutics for the treatment of cancer and antibiotic resistant bacterial infections. Company uses a fragment-based computational approachSCULPT, enhanced with multiple Artificial Intelligence tools for new drug design of pre-optimized target specific libraries of compounds with drug-like properties. Their antibiotic programs target biosynthetic enzymes in gram-negative bacteria, in pathways not found in humans. The targets selected have no clinically used therapeutics, minimizing susceptibility to resistance; and unlike the numerous follow-on antibiotics currently in development. A2A has collaborated with Pharmacyclics, Novartis, J&J, P&G and Insilico Medicine to advance new drug candidates toward IND.
Exscientia
A notable British biotech founded in 2012 in Oxford, using an end-to-end AI platform to design and discover new drugs. The company is looking for treatments that could tackle Sars-Cov-2, other coronaviruses, influenza and Nipah, a respiratory infection that can be passed from animals to humans. And the antiviral drug discovery program is partly funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, building on a previous donation for Exscientia’s work on Covid, in a deal worth up to $70 M.
Globavir Biosciences
Globavir Biosciences is a San Francisco Bay Area based company committed to the development of therapeutics and diagnostics for the treatment of global infectious diseases. Globavir's development strategy harnesses the advantages offered by the 505(b)2 regulatory pathway, allowing for rapid development of new therapies. The firm is initially focused on the treatment of dengue virus infection, a potentially lethal disease infecting 390 million patients annually. Through the combination of their proprietary diagnostic technology and advanced therapeutic candidates, Globavir is ideally positioned to rapidly impact the clinical landscape for Dengue patients. Globavir's platform discovery technologies have further identified candidate compounds with efficacy in additional viral indications, including West Nile, Japanese Encephalitis, Ebola, Marburg, and Hunta viruses.
Insilico Medicine
In May 2022 Hong Kong-based pioneer in deep learning applications for drug discovery announced the nomination of a novel preclinical therapeutic candidate for treating COVID-19, designed using their generative chemistry AI platform Chemistry42, a part of the end-to-end drug discovery engine Pharma.AI. The new drug candidate is a 3CL protease inhibitor unique from existing drugs in its class because it can be rapidly produced in sufficient industrial amounts, upon need.
Notably, Insilico Medicine’s AI platform demonstrated ability to generalize towards various therapeutic areas and indications, with a cascade of target discovery announcements and drug candidate nominations. One of Insilico Medicine’s candidates for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) recently entered clinical development stage.
PostEra
PostEra is an American biotechnology company specializing in machine learning for preclinical drug discovery with help of Manifold software platform for synthesis and search across every available molecule. In January 2022 PostEra and Pfizer entered a $260 M strategic collaboration, within which firms will work together on multiple drug discovery programs with an initial focus in oncology and Covid-19 antivirals. And this is not the only achievement in the antiviral field, in May 2022 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have announced that PostEra has been awarded $68 million as part of the agency’s efforts to develop antiviral drugs to prevent the next pandemic.
Totient
Totient is an AI-driven biotechnology company leveraging tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs) to identify novel tissue-specific antigens and develop matching high-affinity antibody therapeutics. The company reconstructs antibodies from tissues affected by autoimmunity, infections, and cancer collected from patients experiencing exceptional immune responses. Totient succeeded to reconstruct more than 4,500 antibodies from over 50,000 patients and has de-orphaned a collection of promising antibodies by identifying and validating their target antigens. In 2021 Totient was acquired by a synthetic biology company AbSci that expects to generate a large collection of natural human antibodies and target antigens that it may leverage for therapeutic protein design as well as deep learning model training.
Topic: Biotech Ventures
