Insilico Medicine's ISM055 treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) has completed its first clinical trial in Australia, becoming the world's first ai-driven discovery of a novel target and molecular structure. The foreign company, which has set up a drug development centre in Shanghai, has submitted a pre-application to the Drug Evaluation Centre of China's State Food and Drug Administration and is expected to start a phase 1 clinical trial in China in the first half of next year.
Professor Michael Levitt, a Biophysicist and Nobel Laureate in chemistry, believes it is a milestone in the field of AI pharmaceuticals, which is revolutionising the biomedical industry.
From the discovery of new drug targets to clinical trials, insilicon Intelligent Shanghai R&D Center has played an important role. "We can use AI to design new drugs in many parts of the world, but Shanghai is the first place to conduct new drug research and development experiments, because it is the center of biomedical innovation." "Said Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, a Canadian scientist and founder of the company.
Artificial intelligence runs through the development of new drugs
Zavorokov's entrepreneurial journey began in 2013. Deep learning technologies such as generative adversarial networks allowed AI to outperform humans in image, speech and text recognition, giving him an entrepreneurial idea -- could they be applied to drug discovery?
Dr. Alex Zavorokov
Since then, the international industry trend proves that this venture caught the "wind". Artificial intelligence (AI) medicine has become a hot technology field. According to statistics, there are about 240 AI pharmaceutical companies in the world, which attracted $1.9 billion of investment last year. In October this year, six multinational pharmaceutical companies including Astrazeneca, Merck and Pfizer jointly established the AION Laboratory with Amazon and the Israel Biotechnology Foundation to explore the development of new drugs using artificial intelligence and other technologies. In November, Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced the creation of an A.I. pharmaceutical company headed by Demis Hassabis, who led the team that developed AlphaGo and Alpha Folding systems.
According to Levitt, the main feature of INSILICON intelligence is that it uses AI throughout the whole process of drug discovery, rather than being limited to a single step. Chemistry42, a platform for the design and generation of small molecule compounds, and InClinico, a platform for the prediction of clinical trial results.
A candidate drug for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, ISM055, was born from this system. Its targets are new and discovered by the PandaOmics platform. Through the analysis of omics data and text data pools, the platform finds the genetic differences between patients and healthy people, and then combines the comprehensive analysis of signal pathways, scientific literature, opinion leaders and other information to find the correlation between targets and diseases, and then finds new targets for certain indications.
On this Chemistry42 platform, a series of small molecule compounds have been designed and synthesized using deep learning algorithms such as generative adjunctive network. Chemistry42 is a series of chemical compounds that are tested experimentally. The platform takes deep learning from the data and then synthesizes a batch of better compounds. In this way, after several rounds of "design-synthesis-test-optimization", INsilicon intelligence identified preclinical candidate compounds.
Insilicon intelligent "end-to-end" drug development platform Pharma.ai
Zhangjiang Pharmaceutical Valley attracts global talents to Shanghai
The inSILICON Intelligent Research and development Center in Shanghai is located in Zhangjiang Pharmaceutical Valley. It has more than 70 employees, of whom more than 60% are PHDS. Led by Dr. Feng Ren, the Company's Chief Scientific Officer, the Shanghai R&D Center is responsible for advancing ai-discovered new drugs into clinical trials and establishing an extensive pipeline of preclinical and clinical stage innovative drugs. At present, the center has established more than 30 preclinical pipeline in cancer, fibrosis, immune diseases and other fields. The center has also signed cooperation agreements with many domestic pharmaceutical companies, such as Huadong Pharmaceutical, Xihu Pharmaceutical and Jinfang Pharmaceutical, to develop new drugs with artificial intelligence.
"Zhangjiang Pharmaceutical Valley has so many CROs [pharmaceutical research and development contract outsourcing services], so many talented people, such a vibrant and hard-working community focused on delivering experimental results quickly and with the highest quality, which is why we chose to locate in Shanghai." With three "so" s in succession, Zavorokov explained Shanghai's attraction to global biomedical and life science talents. Insilicon Intelligence collects information and data while conducting preclinical cell experiments and animal experiments in several CROS to rapidly iterate the ai system, according to the report. "This has allowed us to develop pipelines very quickly, and the only place that can accommodate this kind of process management innovation is Shanghai."
Dr. Zavorokov and Dr. Feng Ren
Zavorokov was also pleased by the establishment of the Zhangjiang AI (artificial intelligence) New Drug development Alliance. The league by Chen kx established in October this year, jiang, staff - three academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences initiative, Shanghai institute of materia medica, Shanghai higher institute of zhejiang university, meidi silicon west, British intelligence, Shanghai initiated the unit such as John's founding, aimed at project, for traction, biological medicine and scientific research institutions and enterprises in the field of artificial intelligence together, to carry out collaborative research. With the help of alliance platform, INSILICON intelligence will usher in greater development in Shanghai.
How to cultivate talents for "smart medicine" RESEARCH and development
According to the concept of Zhangjiang AI New Drug R&d Alliance, by 2025, the "AI smart medicine ecology" of Zhangjiang Pharmaceutical Valley is expected to gather 300 active institutions, 30 innovative consortions and 30 enabling platforms, and ARTIFICIAL intelligence is expected to help increase 30 first-class new drug pipelines every year.
Levitt believes that drug discovery has become less efficient in recent years and that something is needed to radically improve efficiency. "One idea is to use AI throughout the whole drug development process, starting from finding targets like Insilicon Intelligence. Essentially, AI can bring in as much information as possible and process it in a smart, balanced way, which is clearly the right way to do research."
"The failure rate of target discovery is very high, and this is a fundamental challenge for the biomedical industry." "In ISM055, we used 'end-to-end' AI to discover new targets and validate the efficacy and safety of drug candidates in multiple preclinical models," Zavorokov said. Ai is expected not only to reduce the failure rate of target discovery, but also to improve the efficiency of drug discovery and save r&d costs. Taking ISM055 as an example, INSILICON Intelligence completed the process from target discovery to pre-clinical candidate identification in only 18 months with a r&d investment of US $2.6 million. Traditional drug discovery takes more than four years, costs hundreds of millions of dollars and risks a high failure rate.
ISM055 project research and development process
In the face of the "AI + biomedicine" revolution, apart from building an "AI smart medicine ecology", what else can Shanghai do? Both foreign experts mentioned the importance of talent cultivation.
As the honorary dean of the Institute for Complex Systems and Multiscale Studies at Fudan University, Levitt this year offered "Introduction to Frontiers of Quantitative Biophysics" to Fudan undergraduates. The course is open to students majoring in biology, physics, chemistry, pharmacy, mathematics and computer science, as biophysics is highly interdisciplinary, and artificial intelligence pharmacy is one of them. Levitt suggests that more research universities offer courses in quantitative biophysics or computational biology to undergraduates to entice them into the field.
Insilicon's intelligent training of talents is also worth learning from Shanghai. According to Zavorokov, the company has nearly 70 AI experts who have emerged from hackathon competitions. After being recruited by the company, they will receive two to three years of training in biochemistry and medical knowledge, and grow into "artificial intelligence + biological medicine" compound talents. In order to speed up the development of artificial intelligence pharmaceutical technology and industry, Shanghai can learn from this talent training model and transform a large number of information technology "hackers" into "intelligent medicine" r&d talents.
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