Insilico Medicine to present on applications of DL to drug discovery and repurposing at Boston SPDR

 Insilico Medicine today announced that it will present its recent advances in applying deep learning techniques to drug discovery and repurposing at the Strategic Partnerships in Drug Repurposing conference in Boston taking place at the Wyndham Boston Beacon Hill 27-28th of October. The CEO of Insilico Medicine, Alex Zhavoronkov, Ph.D. will give a talk titled "Deep Learning for Drug Repurposing". 

"We are very happy to be invited to present our research on deep-learned predictors of therapeutic use and adverse effects of the molecules trained on transcriptional response data and large data sets of molecular fingerprints. Many approved drugs and drugs that are currently in the pipelines of major pharmaceutical companies may be even more effective in conditions unrelated to the primary indications. We developed rather sophisticated pipelines to identify these alternative indications and can be used in precision medicine and even personalized drug discovery applications", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc. 

Advances in artificial intelligence are quickly propagating into areas, where large data sets are available for training and the pharmaceutical industry in no exception. Earlier this year Insilico Medicine published several seminal papers describing proofs of concept of application of deep learning techniques to drug discovery (Deep Learning Applications for Predicting Pharmacological Properties of Drugs and Drug Repurposing Using Transcriptomic Data in Molecular Pharmaceutics), to biomarker development (Deep biomarkers of human aging: Application of deep neural networks to biomarker development in Aging, and to predicting the differentiation state of cells and tissues by developing a resource called Embryonic.AI in collaboration with Biotime. These concepts have been significantly expanded and applied to massive public and private data sets. The company presented a study on issues with population-specificity of deep blood biochemistry biomarkers as well as new machine learning techniques for geroprotector discovery at its annual International Aging Research for Drug Discovery Forum in Basel, Switzerland in September. 

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About Strategic Partnerships in Drug Repurposing

The Strategic Partnerships for Drug Repurposing Forum is organized by a conference conglomerate ExL Events. The conference is focused on the latest advances in drug repurposing, repositioning and rescue. Delegates learn about the different resources available to them, including public-private partnerships, foundations, patient advocacy groups, universities and other funding partners.The conference helps identify therapeutic areas or disease states that need drugs, and enable them to adopt and customize a plan for their own business models. 

The conference program is available at: http://exlevents.com/strategic-partnerships-drug-repurposing-forum/

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 with R&D resources in Belgium, Russia and Poland hiring talent through hackathons and competitions. 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. Through its Pharma.AI division the company provides advanced machine learning services to biotechnology, pharmaceutical and skin care companies. Brief company video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8

Insilico Medicine to present on recent advances in AI at BioData World in Cambridge

 Insilico Medicine, Inc to present on the recent advances in applying the deep learning techniques to biomarker development and drug discovery at the BioData World Congress in Cambridge, UK. Jane Schastnaya, a research scientist at Insilico Medicine, will give a presentation on October 27th in the "Genomics personalized medicine and biomarkers" track. 

The presentation titled "Actionable biomarkers of aging and disease trained on biochemistry and transcriptomics data" will cover the applications of deep learning techniques to large repositories of biomedical data and creating multi-modal biomarkers and predictors of therapeutic use of the drugs for high-throughput screening, deep-learned predictor of human age trained on human blood biochemistry and transcriptomics data. It will also cover the new method for deriving the importance of the features in deep networks soon to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. 

"BioData World is one of the world's top conferences on bioinformatics bridging academia and industry, and I am very thankful to the organizers and our company for the opportunity to present our research at such a high-profile event. Insilico Medicine is clearly one of the leaders in the field with several "industry firsts" and events like BioData World allow us to find new challenges and sources of data that rapidly result in valuable research results. I will be presenting our work on applying deep learning techniques to estimating the chronological age of the patient using very simple blood tests as well as the comprehensive gene expression data. These biomarkers of aging are likely to be indicative of the overall health status and can be combined with the biomarkers of age-related diseases and used to improve clinical trials enrollment practices", said Jane Schastnaya, a research scientist at Insilico Medicine.

Sr. research scientist, pharmaceutical artificial intelligence (http://www.Pharma.AI) division will help with the Q&A and facilitate the discussion on applying the deep learning techniques to biomarker development and combining deep reinforcement learning and generative adversarial networks for drug discovery and establish collaborations with the top industry and academic thought leaders attending the conference. 

"Many of the advances that brought fame and recognition to the deep learning approaches were made using the imaging and text data and new discoveries are published every day. However, the adoption of these advances for drug discovery and biomarker development has been very slow, because these require domain expertise in many areas, vast amounts of data and biologically-relevant validation. At Insilico we have a very strong ecosystem which allows us to solve complex problems ranging from biomarker development to precision drug discovery to aging research. We are very happy to take part in the BioData World conference to meet some of the world's top thought leaders and present our work", said Poly Mamoshina, sr. research scientist at Insilico Medicine. 

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About BioData World Congress

BioData World Congress is the world's leading event for individuals working with Big Data in precision medicine. The BioData World Congress UK partnered with the worlds of leading organizations: EMBL EBI, Genomics England, Sanger Institute and many others. The event will showcase innovation, demonstrate success and break through the obstacles and barriers to ensure that the innovations in genomics and big data enter the clinic with speed and efficiency. It will aim to make the dream of stratified medicine a reality. With hundreds of delegates from all over the world and thought leaders from the top academic, industry and governmental organizations, BioData World Congress is one of the main international events on data-driven personalized medicine. Website: http://www.healthnetworkcommunications.com/conference/biodatA/index.stm

About Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine, Inc. is a bioinformatics company located at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore with R&D resources in Belgium, Russia and Poland hiring talent through hackathons and competitions. 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. Through its Pharma.AI division the company provides advanced machine learning services to biotechnology, pharmaceutical and skin care companies. Brief company video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8

Insilico Medicine uses AI to identify geroprotectors predicted to support human longevity

Compounds with potential to extend human life identified using advances in computational biology and artificial intelligence

Summary:

• An international group of expert scientists led by Insilico Medicine published a research paper, "In search for geroprotectors: in silico screening and in vitro validation of signalome-level mimetics of young healthy state" in one of the highest-impact journals in the field, "Aging" 
• The paper presents a novel way to screen for compounds that demonstrate geroprotection by mimicking the young healthy state in tissue samples from elderly subjects using computational approaches and in vitro validation
• The top geroprotector, in terms of performance in both enhancing viability and rejuvenation was PD-98059, a highly selective inhibitor of MEK1 and the MAP kinase cascade. Natural compounds predicted to have excellent geroprotective efficacy and safety in humans include N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC), Myricetin and Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG)
• Scientists used ensembles of deep neural networks to predict the safety of the compounds
• Reference: Aliper, et al (2016) "In search for geroprotectors: in silico screening and in vitro validation of signalome-level mimetics of young healthy state" Aging (Albany NY), DOI: 10.18632/aging.101047 , http://www.aging-us.com/article/MHpmpbTNuNqLnCN9g/text#fulltext

     Insilico Medicine, Inc. today announced the publication of a research paper describing the applications of its human signaling pathway-centric GeroScope platform for scoring human tissue-specific geroprotective properties of compounds implicated in the aging of model organisms. GeroScope utilizes large human gene expression databases to analyze changes in tissue samples from healthy young compared with old human subjects at the level of signaling pathways implicated in aging and longevity. This enables the identification of compounds with known transcriptional response profiles that may be able to mimic the young healthy state in old human tissues. In collaboration with Life Extension Foundation Buyer's Club, Inc., a trailblazer in the dietary supplement industry with a focus on health and wellness, authors analyzed the top scoring naturally-occurring compounds to predict the possible pathway-level synergy of combinations. 

"Life Extension Foundation Buyer's Club is a science-based nutritional supplement company recognized for their cutting-edge products and information. We are happy to collaborate with Life Extension Foundation Buyer's Club and their deep passion for health and wellness. Together we will make a major impact on the identification of natural compounds with critical health, wellness, and longevity properties," said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc. and the CSO of the Biogerontology Research Foundation (UK).

The study initiated with 70 compounds that already had been implicated in extension of life span in animal models (Geroprotectors.Org) for which transcriptional response data in human cell lines was available. The compounds were scored for their ability to mimic the young healthy state in old tissues and the list of compounds was narrowed to just a few candidates that were ordered and tested in human senescent fibroblasts. 

"We are excited to have these results published, since they served as an excellent platform for follow up studies we have underway. Over the past year we made considerable progress in applying deep learning to geroprotector discovery and development of comprehensive biomarkers of aging and reconfirmed some of the findings in this paper using other methods," said Alex Aliper, president of Insilico Medicine and the lead author on the paper. 

To predict the possible side effects of the compounds the scientists applied the available transcriptional response data to ensembles of the deep neural networks trained on tens of thousands of samples. While not without caveats, this approach may serve as the proof of concept for evaluating the possible adverse effects of compounds that have not yet been tested in humans. 

"We at Life Extension Foundation Buyer's Club are focused on identifying natural products with critical health and wellness properties. Our collaboration with Insilico Medicine will enable us to apply artificial intelligence, sophisticated biologically-inspired algorithms and our knowledge of dietary supplements to the discovery and development of unique science-based products. This paper represents an example of merging artificial intelligence with natural product knowledge to produce leading-edge scientific results," said Andrew G. Swick, PhD, senior vice president of scientific affairs, discovery research and product development for Life Extension.

"There has been much progress in biogerontology in the recent years and while working with model organisms, we need new methods for estimating the potential utility for humans. Insilico Medicine is clearly leading the way in this regard. In this paper we demonstrated proof of concept, where geroprotective efficacy is predicted and then validated experimentally in human senescent cells," said Alexey Moskalev, PhD, DSc, professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences, adjunct professor of the George Mason University and advisor to Insilico Medicine. 

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Journal reference: Aliper, et al (2016) "In search for geroprotectors: in silico screening and in vitro validation of signalome-level mimetics of young healthy state" Aging (Albany NY), DOI: 10.18632/aging.101047 http://www.aging-us.com/article/MHpmpbTNuNqLnCN9g/text#fulltext

About Life Extension 

A trailblazer in the $35 billion U.S. dietary supplement industry for the past 36 years, Life Extension Foundation Buyer's Club's mission is providing cutting-edge information and dietary supplements to facilitate healthy longevity. Life Extension Foundation Buyer's Club, Inc. ("Life Extension") offers a full-range of premium-quality dietary supplements as well as unique, scientifically-supported formulas. The company's products are developed based on scientific studies from peer-reviewed medical journals and are consistently updated as new information occurs. To learn more about Life Extension Foundation Buyer's Club, visit http://www.lifeextension.com/

About Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine, Inc. is a bioinformatics company located at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore with R&D resources in Belgium, Russia and Poland hiring talent through hackathons and competitions. 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. Through its Pharma.AI division the company provides advanced machine learning services to biotechnology, pharmaceutical and skin care companies. Brief company video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8