WuXi AppTec and Insilico Medicine establish a close strategic collaboration to integrate next-generation artificial intelligence with drug discovery
BALTIMORE, Maryland and SHANGHAI, June 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Insilico Medicine, a Baltimore-based next-generation artificial intelligence company specialized in the application of deep learning for target identification, drug discovery and aging research, announced that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with WuXi AppTec, a leading global pharmaceutical and medical device open-access capability and technology platform company.
Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will perform series of experiments, where many novel molecules discovered using Insilico Medicine's generative adversarial networks (GAN) and reinforcement learning (RL)-based drug discovery pipelines will be tested at WuXi AppTec. The companies set a series of milestones to apply next-generation AI to discover the ideal pre-clinical candidates for novel and challenging biological targets, including orphan targets with no known crystal structure and no known ligands.
"More than 90% of the molecules discovered the traditional techniques and tested in mice fail in human clinical trials. Our goal at Insilico Medicine is to develop advanced end-to-end AI solutions to discover the optimal pre-clinical candidates," said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine. "Our collaboration with WuXi AppTec enables us to focus on artificial intelligence without the need to invest in the expensive laboratory infrastructure. It also enables us to collaborate with some of the world's brightest medicinal chemists and biologists to optimize the drug development process."
Since 2016, Insilico Medicine published multiple research papers, demonstrating the capabilities of GANs and RL systems for de novo generation of diverse molecules with the desired molecular properties, and preliminary experimental validation uncovered the most promising research directions. The new research collaboration with WuXi AppTec will enable the company to perform the rapid experimental validation of the molecules discovered using AI and generate the valuable data to advance its AI research.
"We devised series of experiments to test the capabilities of the novel molecular generators and generate valuable data for the AI-powered drug discovery. The experimental results we saw so far look very promising and provide some confidence that artificial intelligence and deep learning can be helpful for drug discovery," said Dr. Tao Guo, Vice President, Head of International Discovery Service Unit of WuXi AppTec. "The compounds generated by Insilico Medicine's innovative approaches to artificial intelligence have the potential to shorten cycle times and improve the quality of pre-clinical candidates."
Insilico Medicine's work was recently covered by MIT Technology Review China, Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, The Pharmaceutical Journal and many others. The Company is routinely publishing advanced research in peer-reviewed journals and presenting at the major industry conferences.
About WuXi AppTec
WuXi AppTec (603259, SH) is a leading global pharmaceutical and medical device open-access capability and technology platform company with global operations. As an innovation-driven and customer-focused company, WuXi AppTec provides a broad and integrated portfolio of services to help our worldwide customers and partners shorten the discovery and development time and lower the cost of drug and medical device R&D through cost-effective and efficient solutions. With its industry-leading capabilities such as small molecule R&D and manufacturing, cell therapy and gene therapy R&D and manufacturing, and medical device testing, WuXi AppTec is committed to enabling innovative collaborators to bring innovative healthcare products to patients, and to fulfilling WuXi's dream that "every drug can be made and every disease can be treated."
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine is an artificial intelligence company headquartered at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore, with R&D and management resources in Belgium, Russia, UK, Taiwan and Korea sourced through hackathons and competitions. The company and its scientists is dedicated to extending human productive longevity and transforming every step of the drug discovery and drug development process through excellence in biomarker discovery, drug development, digital medicine and aging research.
Insilico pioneered the applications of the generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning for generation of novel molecular structures for the diseases with a known target and with no known targets. In addition to working collaborations with the large pharmaceutical companies, the company is pursuing internal drug discovery programs in cancer, dermatological diseases, fibrosis, Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease, ALS, diabetes, sarcopenia, and aging. Through a partnership with LifeExtension.com the company launched a range of nutraceutical products compounded using the advanced bioinformatics techniques and deep learning approaches. It also provides a range of consumer-facing applications including Young.AI.
In 2017, NVIDIA selected Insilico Medicine as one of the Top 5 AI companies in its potential for social impact. In 2018, the company was named one of the global top 100 AI companies by CB Insights. Brief company video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8
Media Contacts:
WuXi AppTec
Gracie Rong
rong_yingbei@wuxiapptec.com
Insilico Medicine
Qingsong Zhu
zhu@insilico.com
