Sunday, March 29, 2015
Friday, March 27, 2015
InSilico Medicine, Inc. Stands Out from High Tech Startups at 2015 GPU Conference
Focused on Extending the Human Lifespan, the bioinformatics company is one of 12 rising star technology companies recognized as the most promising GPU-fueled Startup
San Jose, CA (PRWEB) March 27, 2015
While deep learning was the topic of many conversations at last week’s 2015 GPU technology conference (GTC),
the CEO of one start-up spoke passionately about using fast GPUs to
fight cancer and push the human lifespan well beyond the
generally-agreed ceiling of 120 years.Insilico Medicine, a Baltimore MD informatics company, is one of 12 companies recognized as the hottest GPU-powered startups in the US.
While other startups in the GTC Emerging Companies Summit have business models focused on self-driving cars, gaming, animation, or imaging, Insilico Medicine is the only start-up using GPU technology to fight age-related diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s.
"We live in a very exciting time when information technology is converging with biotechnology," said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, the CEO of Insilico Medicine. "We developed a bioinformatics platform and strategy to tackle humanity's greatest challenge - aging and age-related diseases and we're honored to be recognized by NVIDIA as a promising GPU-powered startup."
Until the early 1990s, biology and related fields required very little experience with computers. Now, however, the vast amount of DNA and molecular data generated from the Human Genome Project and labs around the world have made high-powered computer analysis necessary. Because GPU-accelerated computing is the fastest way to analyze data, Insilico Medicine has received a great deal of attention in recent weeks from pharmaceutical companies and investors. Medical researchers agree GPU computing and computer science will play a key role in finding cures for age-related diseases and extending the human lifespan.
“Aging is humanity's most complex and daunting medical problem and it has defeated us for too long, said Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a gerontology expert and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation. “We will overcome it with a trifecta of new technologies, new insights - and new data analysis tools, an area at which Insilico Medicine promises to be at the forefront.“
the 11 GPU-powered companies joining Insilico Medicine include Artomax, Ersatz Labs, FluiDyna, GeekSys, Intempora, NE Scientific, Pythia Systems, QM Scientific, Redshift Rendering Technologies, Replica Labs, and SYSTAP.
"To analyze how cancer cells respond to certain treatments, you must run drug scoring algorithms on high-end big data computer systems," said Zhavoronkov. “And no one can manage this work more effectively than our team of experts in both computer science and bioscience.”
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine, Inc. is a Baltimore-based company utilizing advances in genomics and big data analysis for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company utilizes the GeroScope™, OncoFinder™ , Pathway Cloud Intelligence™ and PharmAtlas™ packages for aging and cancer research, pursues internal drug discovery programs, and provides services to pharmaceutical companies.
If you have any questions about the science of aging, bioinformatics, or Insilico Medicine's plan to use GPUs in anti-aging research and drug discovery, please call (443) 451- 7212 or visit: http://www.insilicomedicine.com.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Drug makers join the battle against aging
Materials was got from this Boston Globe site http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/01/26/drug-makers-join-battle-against-aging/iSgVDacO74oeXIrHy0KIIO/story.html?event=event25
This is the “replacement parts” approach, in the words of Mark Fishman, president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, the research arm of the giant Swiss drug company.
Then there is the “extended warranty” strategy, as he calls it: delaying diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s in order to keep people alive and healthy longer
Fishman’s boss, Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez, has said he wants his company to lead the industry’s research into anti-aging strategies, a pledge that cheered patient advocates.
“I think it’s great to see pharma companies think more about aging,” said Brian Kennedy, chief executive of the Buck Institute, a California anti-aging research organization. “Others are talking about it. Novartis is the first.”
Among Novartis’s efforts on “replacement parts” are drugs under development to treat eye disease, hearing loss, damaged cartilage, and weakening muscles.
“The spare parts piece is a little more tractable within the lifetime of a pharmaceutical company,” Fishman said.
As part of the extended-warranty approach, Novartis is exploring whether an existing medicine can be repurposed to keep the body’s immune system from weakening and potentially extend healthy life. Much of Novartis’s research is conducted in Cambridge, at the company’s Institutes for BioMedical Research.
But this broader effort has its own challenges, and not just in the lab. For one, the pharmaceutical industry has not figured out how to get the Food and Drug Administration to authorize drugs that target an overall condition like aging, whose symptoms are not at a diagnosable or acute stage.
Yet people in the industry say the idea itself — being able to extend healthy life with drugs — is not that far off.
“Aging has been delayed in many, many labs,” said Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “The proof of concept has been achieved.”
Several commonly used medicines — aspirin, ibuprofen, and the diabetes drug metformin — have shown life-extending properties in animal studies. But they also have side effects, and researchers do not recommend taking them specifically to slow aging.
Normally, as people age, their ability to mount an immune response declines, even limiting the effectiveness of vaccines. But in a December study in Science Translational Medicine, Novartis showed that its kidney cancer drug everolimus, given with the flu shot, boosted the effectiveness of the flu shot. If the drug can help counter the immune system’s natural decline, it might win Food and Drug Administration approval to be administered in combination with vaccines.
Back on the “spare parts” front, both Novartis and Genentech are developing drugs to treat a form of eye disease known as dry macular degeneration. Both drugs aim to block the inflammation that can lead to the disease. Novartis’s drug has begun the early stages of human trials; it would be administered by a shot to the eye.
“Where you have to block and what’s the best way to block remains to be determined,” Fishman said of the eye treatment.
Hearing loss is another common symptom of aging. One cause is longtime exposure to loud noises that kill the tiny hairlike cells in the ear whose motion allows us to hear. The body cannot replace those cells naturally, so the more that are killed, the worse hearing becomes. Novartis is exploring whether the injection of a gene called Atonal 1 into the ear will turn regular cells into the hairlike ones.
“Even cooler is the fact that the nerve cells . . . reconnect up and in animal studies reestablish hearing,” Fishman said.
Many older people feel the effects of aging on their joints with every movement. For knees, for example, Novartis has discovered an agent that in animal studies may help torn and worn cartilage rebuild to original form. It is not clear yet how often the drug will need to be administered.
“In animals, one shot [in the knee] seems to do it for quite a while,” said Ronenn Roubenoff, a former professor at Tufts University who is now a researcher for Novartis. “But animals tend to heal faster than humans, especially humans over age 40.”
Muscle loss can quickly undermine an older person’s independence and lead to other problems. Drug companies Eli Lilly and Co. and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals are trying to develop a treatment to promote muscle growth by blocking a protein called myostatin.
Novartis is hoping that its own drug will be even more effective at strengthening muscles. In a paper Roubenoff and other Boston researchers published in December in the scientific journal Neurology, the drug was shown to restore thigh muscle volume for a small number of patients with the inclusion body myositis, a rare muscle disease. The company is in late-stage testing of the drug.
Roubenoff said his overall goal is not to prevent aging, but to prevent the disabilities that people get as they age.
“We want to focus on the folks who are at the limit of what they can handle, and where we can really make a difference,” Roubenoff said.
Karen Weintraub can be reached at weintraubkaren@gmail.com.
The battle against aging is being waged on two fronts.
One
is the traditional approach of treating specific illnesses and failures
as they arise: Helping people with creaky knees or hips to continue
walking will keep them healthier.This is the “replacement parts” approach, in the words of Mark Fishman, president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, the research arm of the giant Swiss drug company.
Then there is the “extended warranty” strategy, as he calls it: delaying diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s in order to keep people alive and healthy longer
Fishman’s boss, Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez, has said he wants his company to lead the industry’s research into anti-aging strategies, a pledge that cheered patient advocates.
“I think it’s great to see pharma companies think more about aging,” said Brian Kennedy, chief executive of the Buck Institute, a California anti-aging research organization. “Others are talking about it. Novartis is the first.”
Among Novartis’s efforts on “replacement parts” are drugs under development to treat eye disease, hearing loss, damaged cartilage, and weakening muscles.
“The spare parts piece is a little more tractable within the lifetime of a pharmaceutical company,” Fishman said.
As part of the extended-warranty approach, Novartis is exploring whether an existing medicine can be repurposed to keep the body’s immune system from weakening and potentially extend healthy life. Much of Novartis’s research is conducted in Cambridge, at the company’s Institutes for BioMedical Research.
But this broader effort has its own challenges, and not just in the lab. For one, the pharmaceutical industry has not figured out how to get the Food and Drug Administration to authorize drugs that target an overall condition like aging, whose symptoms are not at a diagnosable or acute stage.
Yet people in the industry say the idea itself — being able to extend healthy life with drugs — is not that far off.
“Aging has been delayed in many, many labs,” said Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “The proof of concept has been achieved.”
Several commonly used medicines — aspirin, ibuprofen, and the diabetes drug metformin — have shown life-extending properties in animal studies. But they also have side effects, and researchers do not recommend taking them specifically to slow aging.
Normally, as people age, their ability to mount an immune response declines, even limiting the effectiveness of vaccines. But in a December study in Science Translational Medicine, Novartis showed that its kidney cancer drug everolimus, given with the flu shot, boosted the effectiveness of the flu shot. If the drug can help counter the immune system’s natural decline, it might win Food and Drug Administration approval to be administered in combination with vaccines.
Back on the “spare parts” front, both Novartis and Genentech are developing drugs to treat a form of eye disease known as dry macular degeneration. Both drugs aim to block the inflammation that can lead to the disease. Novartis’s drug has begun the early stages of human trials; it would be administered by a shot to the eye.
“Where you have to block and what’s the best way to block remains to be determined,” Fishman said of the eye treatment.
Hearing loss is another common symptom of aging. One cause is longtime exposure to loud noises that kill the tiny hairlike cells in the ear whose motion allows us to hear. The body cannot replace those cells naturally, so the more that are killed, the worse hearing becomes. Novartis is exploring whether the injection of a gene called Atonal 1 into the ear will turn regular cells into the hairlike ones.
“Even cooler is the fact that the nerve cells . . . reconnect up and in animal studies reestablish hearing,” Fishman said.
Many older people feel the effects of aging on their joints with every movement. For knees, for example, Novartis has discovered an agent that in animal studies may help torn and worn cartilage rebuild to original form. It is not clear yet how often the drug will need to be administered.
“In animals, one shot [in the knee] seems to do it for quite a while,” said Ronenn Roubenoff, a former professor at Tufts University who is now a researcher for Novartis. “But animals tend to heal faster than humans, especially humans over age 40.”
Muscle loss can quickly undermine an older person’s independence and lead to other problems. Drug companies Eli Lilly and Co. and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals are trying to develop a treatment to promote muscle growth by blocking a protein called myostatin.
Novartis is hoping that its own drug will be even more effective at strengthening muscles. In a paper Roubenoff and other Boston researchers published in December in the scientific journal Neurology, the drug was shown to restore thigh muscle volume for a small number of patients with the inclusion body myositis, a rare muscle disease. The company is in late-stage testing of the drug.
Roubenoff said his overall goal is not to prevent aging, but to prevent the disabilities that people get as they age.
“We want to focus on the folks who are at the limit of what they can handle, and where we can really make a difference,” Roubenoff said.
Karen Weintraub can be reached at weintraubkaren@gmail.com.
Insilico Medicine to exhibit at NVIDIA GTC in San Jose, March 17-20
Insilico Medicine, Inc. is a Baltimore-based company utilizing advances in genomics and big data analysis for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company utilizes the GeroScope™, OncoFinder™ , Pathway Cloud Intelligence™ and PharmAtlas™ packages for aging and cancer research, pursues internal drug discovery programs, and provides services to pharmaceutical companies. For more information on Insilico Medicine, please visit http://www.insilicomedicine.com.
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