Tuesday, January 12, 2016

InSilico Medicine presents advances in deep learning for drug discovery and aging research

InSilico Medicine will present an update on recent advances in applying signaling pathway activation analysis and deep learning to drug discovery and drug repurposing for age-related diseases at the Biotech Showcase in San Francisco.

Aging research is a very controversial area with many failed claims and promises and in order to establish the proof of concept of its approach, InSilico Medicine decided to build a sustainable business model providing pathway activation analysis and machine learning services to pharmaceutical companies, academic and clinical institutions helping drive innovation in many areas of research.

"Our mission is to extend healthy human longevity and we spent several years developing a sustainable model to enable the company to effectively use massive heterogeneous biological data sets for drug discovery, biomarker development and personalized medicine. With over 20 academic publications published in 2015 and over 150 collaborators worldwide, we are very excited to present our results that will lead to faster and more effective diagnostics and cures in many age-related diseases", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of InSilico Medicine, Inc and Chief Science Officer of the Biogerontology Research Foundation.

Deep learning technologies resulted in major breakthroughs in image, voice and text recognition, autonomous driving, networking and mobile applications surpassing human accuracy and demonstrating unprecedented results. However, in genomic and transcriptomic analysis, drug discovery and repurposing and many other areas of biomedicine, progress has been much slower. Since November 2014 InSilico Medicine decided to shift its focus on and commit to deep learning technologies despite many early failures showing superiority of other machine learning techniques.

"When it comes to training deep neural networks with transcriptomic and other types of biological data many groups notice the superiority of advanced implementations of SVM, GBM and other machine learning methods. However, there is much to be learned from the inaccuracies of the DNNs that will lead to both new methods to working with biological data and provide clues on alternative uses of drugs particularly when it comes to age-related diseases. Several of our collaborators in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries are already testing these methods and I am happy to be part of the team that will establish more of these collaborations during the J.P. Morgan conference", said Polina Mamoshina, research scientist, InSilico Medicine.

About InSilico Medicine, Inc
InSilico Medicine, Inc. is a bioinformatics company located at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore. It utilizes advances in genomics, big data analysis and deep learning for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company pursues internal drug discovery programs in cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, sarcopenia and geroprotector discovery and provides services to pharmaceutical companies. Brief company video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8

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