MIT Technology Review selects AI molecular design as a breakthrough and highlights Insilico

26th of February, 2020, 7:00 AM ET - Insilico Medicine today announced that MIT Technology Review selected AI-discovered molecules as a breakthrough of the year with the availability horizon of 3-5 years. Insilico Medicine's research together with the University of Toronto was highlighted. 

'The ability of deep learning and other AI tools to find novel molecules with desirable properties will transform drug discovery. It promises to make the development of new medicines far faster and more effective, and is an important new tool in the hunt for better drugs. Insilico Medicine has been a leader in using some of the most exciting techniques in AI, such as GANs, for drug discovery. And, with the latest results, GANs is proving to be a powerful new tool for finding promising molecules.' said David Rotman, Editor at Large.

On the same day, Insilico Medicine announced the launch of its Entrepreneur in Residence program in brain cancers with the objective to externalize the effort before August, 2020. The program will be led by pharma industry expert and seasoned R&D scientist, Dr. George Okafo. 

'I remember the first AI and drug discovery conferences in early 2016 when we presented the first theoretical basis for using the Adversarial Autoencoders (AAE) for the generation of new molecular structures with desired properties. I had to spend a lot of time explaining the principles using images and the deep learning folks did not get the chemistry part and chemists were lost in math and asked for experimental validation. No one took it seriously. Now, most pharmaceutical companies started their internal generative chemistry groups. I am very happy to see that', said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, co-founder, and CEO of Insilico Medicine. 

Generative AI is an emerging technology in both chemistry and biology. Insilico Medicine is working in these areas since 2015 and holds the critical intellectual property. According to the recent opinions, drugs generated using AI may be classified as being invented by AI. Insilico published its first peer-reviewed papers in this area in 2016, multiple theoretical papers in 2017, and recently published several proofs of concept for JAK3 and DDR1 kinaseswith experimental validation. It recently generated and released a range of molecules targeting COVID-19 protease generated in 4 days. Generative biology technology for the target discovery is developed and utilized internally since 2015 and the first landmark experiments are expected to be published in 2020. 

'Drug discovery is a special industry where secrecy is encouraged and many advances cannot be openly shared. Generative chemistry is in a more advanced state than what can be judged from published work as most of the efforts in difficult targets are internal. I hope that within the next couple of years it will be possible to publish these advances, and the pharmaceutical companies will also publish their achievements, and molecules designed using generative chemistry will progress into the clinic', said Alex Aliper, PhD, co-founder and president of Insilico Medicine. 

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About Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine is an artificial intelligence company with offices in six countries and regions striving to accelerate three areas of drug discovery and development: disease target identification, generation of novel molecules (generative chemistry) and synthetic biological data (generative biology), and prediction of clinical trial outcomes. The Company was the first to apply the generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) to generate new molecular structures with the specified parameters in 2015. In addition to collaborating with large pharmaceutical companies, Insilico Medicine is also pursuing internal drug discovery programs in different disease areas. 

Website: http://insilico.com/.

New AI-powered discovery generative biology and generative chemistry effort targeting brain tumors with the focus on GBM launches at Insilico Medicine

February 26th, 2020, 3:00 PM, London - Insilico Medicine has announced a new preclinical research program that will utilize its world-leading AI-driven target discovery and generative chemistry platform technology to accelerate the discovery of new medicines for Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM). To help the company deliver this endeavour, George Okafo, PhD - a pharma industry expert and seasoned R&D scientist - will be joining the company as their Entrepreneur in Residence and will utilize Insilco's generative biology and generative chemistry AI engines to discover novel targets and generate novel molecules for brain cancers.

Generative AI is an emerging technology in both chemistry and biology. Insilico Medicine has been working in these areas since 2015 and holds the critical intellectual property. According to recent opinions, drugs generated using AI may be classified as being invented by AI. Insilico published its first peer-reviewed papers in this area in 2016, multiple theoretical papers in 2017, and recently published several proofs of concept for JAK3 and DDR1 kinases with experimental validation. It recently generated and released a range of molecules targeting COVID-19 protease generated in 4 days. Generative biology technology for the target discovery is developed and utilized internally since 2015 and the first landmark experiments are expected to be published in 2020.

Today MIT Technology Review highlighted AI-discovered molecules as a breakthrough of the year and highlighted Insilico Medicine as one of the leaders in the field. 'The ability of deep learning and other AI tools to find novel molecules with desirable properties will transform drug discovery. It promises to make the development of new medicines far faster and more effective, and is an important new tool in the hunt for better drugs.' said David Rotman, Editor at Large.

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD CEO/Co-founder of Insilico Medicine commented on the start of the brain cancer project, 'Brain cancers are the worst diseases anyone can ever get and the most rare cancers are often overlooked because the efforts are expensive, the market is small, and the probability of failure is high. We will try to change this with our AI-powered drug discovery pipeline. We needed to have a seasoned big pharma veteran to drive this process to the point where it can be quickly developed and externalized. Dr. George Okafo, a seasoned drug hunter, will lead this effort. Our goal is to develop the project to the point where AI is no longer required, and externalize the research project by August 2020 to help patients in need quickly'.

GBM is the most severe and aggressive form of brain cancer in adults with a life expectancy of less than 3 years for the recurrent form of the disease. Globally, GBM affects 150,000 patients annually, with the annual growth rate expected to increase. In the US alone, 16,000 new cases are reported annually.

New AI-powered discovery generative biology and generative chemistry effort targeting brain tumors with the focus on GBM launches at Insilico Medicine

Current GBM standard-of-care involving chemo-radiation therapy is largely ineffective in the most advanced forms of the disease and often requires surgical intervention to remove the entire tumor. However, in many cases, the tumor returns more aggressively and resistant to therapy, if all the cancerous cells are not completely removed, ultimately resulting in death. The need for novel and importantly, rapid approaches for the discovery of new GBM medicines is vital and the Insilico Medicine's entrance into this race is welcomed.

George Okafo, PhD commented 'The problems posed by GBM are too complex and drug discovery is often too slow to solve using traditional approaches. When I came across Insilico Medicine's platform several years ago, they were the only AI company that managed to do target discovery/small molecule generation in one go with the ability to rapidly sprint towards solving diseases. In my new capacity, I am excited to be able to utilize their platform to start a new disease program from scratch with the objective of licensing it out to a big pharma partner or taking it into clinic myself'

Insilico Medicine will be using its world-leading AI-based drug discovery platform to design novel molecules for the most difficult targets. They have proven their technology for targets in oncology, autoimmunity, CNS, Fibrosis, Hair loss and Bacterial Film infections. Recently, their AI platform executed an entire drug discovery cycle in 21 days. This new AI-driven drug discovery partnership aims to reproduce this effort for GBM utilizing the latest generative chemistry platform technology and an expert GBM scientific network to explore completely novel mechanistic biology space to look for new drugs for GBM. The end result will be a comprehensive, high-quality drug candidate data package for GBM.

'Over the past several years we developed and integrated an end-to-end drug discovery platform that is tangibly accelerating the many R&D processes. The many elements of this platform were battle-tested in many collaborations. Here we can use the entire platform to race for a cure. And we have one of the top experts in the field to navigate this process from start to finish', said Alex Aliper, PhD, co-founder and president of Insilico Medicine.

The race is on and Insilico Medicine is ready to go to discover medicines for GBM patients, where current therapeutic options are limited.

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About Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine is an artificial intelligence company with offices in six countries and regions striving to accelerate three areas of drug discovery and development: disease target identification, generation of novel molecules (generative chemistry) and synthetic biological data (generative biology), and prediction of clinical trial outcomes. The Company was the first to apply the generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) to generate new molecular structures with the specified parameters in 2015. In addition to collaborating with large pharmaceutical companies, Insilico Medicine is also pursuing internal drug discovery programs in different disease areas. Website: http://insilico.com/.

Insilico Medicine publishes molecular structures for the key protein target of 2019-nCoV

Insilico Medicine uses the latest advances in next-generation artificial intelligence to generate novel molecular structures

February 6, 2020 - Insilico Medicine announces that it will publish structures of small molecules targeting the key protein 2019-nCoV 3C-like protease. It will synthesize and test up to 100 molecules using its own resources and the resources generously offered by its closest partners, to contribute to the global effort. The rest of the structures are published on the company website with the annotation submitted to the bioRxiv preprint server. By making these structures available to the general public, Insilico hopes those who are interested in finding a potential treatment for this viral infection could synthesize and test these molecules.

The generated molecules are published at https://insilico.com/ncov-sprint/ and will be continuously updated. 

One of the bottlenecks in AI-powered drug discovery is the ability to synthesize and test the molecules quickly. Advanced generative chemistry approaches allow for many diverse molecular structures to be designed with a variety of properties as generation conditions. However, synthesis and validation may take some time and could require substantial resources. Therefore, Insilico Medicine selected up to 100 molecules to be synthesized and tested, with the rest of the generated structures deposited on the website. 

For synthesis and screening Insilico joined forces with many functions of the largest international open research platform, and the company will make its staff and resources available to support drug discovery process to contribute to the global fight against this new health threat. 

"During this difficult time, every promising approach must be used to expedite the drug discovery efforts against 2019-nCoV, including utilizing the generative chemistry part of our end-to-end drug discovery pipeline. We encourage medicinal chemists to evaluate the generated molecules, provide their feedback and consider them for synthesis. Our team will also synthesize and test several of the generated compounds." said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine. 

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About Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine is an artificial intelligence company with offices in six countries and regions striving to accelerate three areas of drug discovery and development: disease target identification, generation of novel molecules (generative chemistry) and synthetic biological data (generative biology), and prediction of clinical trial outcomes. The Company was the first to apply the generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) to generate new molecular structures with the specified parameters in 2015. In addition to collaborating with large pharmaceutical companies, Insilico Medicine is also pursuing internal drug discovery programs in different disease areas. 

Website: http://insilico.com/.

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