13 Publicly Traded Biotechs Utilizing AI-based Research Platforms (+ 2 Upcoming Public Debuts)
According to our intelligence report, The State of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Biopharma Industry, more than 450 life sciences companies in the categories "startups" and "scaleups" are actively using machine learning and deep learning-based predictive and generative capabilities to augment their research strategies.
Some companies are incorporating AI tools to improve specific stages of drug discovery and development, for instance, to better model disease mechanisms or identify drug repurposing opportunities by analyzing omics data. Other companies are building entire end-to-end platforms for hypothesis generation, target discovery, de novo drug design, and even predicting clinical trial outcomes for newly designed candidates.
Below is a list of publicly traded companies with AI-powered platforms, and there is a bonus list of two companies at the end that are currently filing for IPOs.
Disclaimer: This post is not investment advice of any kind; it is for informational purposes only. Neither BPT Analytics Ltd. nor the authors of this post endorse or recommend any particular stocks or investment opportunities. Consult relevant professional service providers for any investment decisions at all times.
AbCellera Biologics Inc (NASDAQ: ABCL)
AbCellera is a US-based biotech company that develops antibody therapeutics using AI. Founded in 2012, the company went public in December 2020 with a record-setting $555.5M IPO.
They focus on searching and analyzing the immune system to find potential antibodies, then outsourcing their initial findings to their partners for further drug discovery. AbCellera also uses humanized antibody platforms to assess various functional modalities of the potential therapeutic molecules.
The company owns sequencing technologies with functional data from single B-cells, which enables researchers to increase the number of antibody candidates. The company offers customized single-cell assays, which help to uncover relevant antibody properties such as specificity, cross-reactivity, affinity, and others. Such assays generate significant amounts of multimodal and multidimensional data, which AbCellera handles with their proprietary antibody visualization software Celium. After selecting the most promising leads by the number of various criteria, computational protein engineering can be used to optimize antibodies while also considering the natural antibodies' diversity.
A clinical-stage company, BenevolentAI, was founded in 2013 and became public in 2021 via the SPAC deal with Odyssey, which valued the British-based pharmaceuticals firm at up to 1.5 billion euros.
BenevolentAI has a leading drug candidate in Phase 2 clinical trials, aiming to treat atopic dermatitis. Other drug candidates include potential treatments for chronic diseases (such as ulcerative colitis), cancer (glioblastoma multiforme), and more. Additionally, there is an established partnership with AstraZeneca to develop drugs for fibrosis and chronic kidney disease. In 2020, BenevolentAI helped re-discover baricitinib as a potential COVID-19 treatment using their Knowledge Graph platform for drug repurposing.
The Benevolent Platform is a computational tool that utilizes predictive AI algorithms to analyze and extract the needed insights from the available data and scientific literature. For example, Knowledge Graph assists with managing the knowledge from publicly available biomedical data, and additional machine learning models help to identify molecular targets and predict molecular interactions with potential drugs.
BioXcel Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ: BTAI)
BioXcel is a US-based biopharmaceutical company founded in 2017. They focus on drug development that utilizes artificial intelligence to identify drug candidates across neuroscience and immuno-oncology. BioXcel went public in 2018 and raised $55.8 million.
BioXcel has an approach that leverages existing approved drugs and/or clinically evaluated product candidates together with big data and machine learning algorithms to identify new therapeutic applications. Most of their drug candidates fit within the field of neuroscience disorders, having an FDA-approved medicine for the acute treatment of agitation associated with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder in adults. Previously, this drug was used in intravenous form for anesthesia, which BioXcel packed into the sublingual films for a new indication. At the same time, the company's pipeline includes clinical studies for combining small-molecule cancer drugs with an antibody, pembrolizumab, for specific cancer cases.
Exscientia (NASDAQ: EXAI)
Oxford-based clinical-stage biotech Exscientia focuses on drug discovery of small molecules for various therapeutic indications using its patient-first AI-driven platform, CentaurAI. Founded in 2012, the company went public in October 2021, raising a total of $510.4 million.
Today, Exscientia possesses multiple drug candidates in the early drug discovery phase—in precision cancer therapy, immunology and inflammation, anti-infectives, and others. One of their candidates in precision cancer therapy reached Phase I of the clinical study.
With its end-to-end AI drug discovery platform, Exscientia offers algorithms for target selection using genetic data, textual data (research articles, patents), patient data, and multiple other data types, as well as the results of sophisticated experimental methods such as high-content screening and surface plasmon resonance. Additionally, the company’s artificial intelligence-based platform can effectively design and optimize small-molecule drugs, leveraging target-driven pharmacology, ADME, 3D structure fingerprints, and other features. Last but not least, Exscientia's AI-driven drug discovery platform is able to anticipate the effectiveness of cancer therapy in the clinic while also matching the drug with the most relevant patient group.
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