Barry Bunin, PhD
Founder & CEO
Collaborative Drug Discovery
“Eli Lilly is Reinventing the Pharma Business.” That’s the headline for an article in The Economist, about what it describes as “The world’s largest drugmaker betting big on preventive medicines—and learning from big tech.” The article begins with the company’s storied history: “In 1876 Eli Lilly, a veteran of the civil war, founded a company in Indianapolis to bring scientific rigor to a medicines market awash with quack cures and miracle remedies. In doing so, he helped usher in the modern pharmaceutical industry. A century and a half later, the company that bears his name wants to reinvent it again.” I read the article on my kitchen table and was delighted to hear that it mentioned Lilly TuneLab, by concept. The article notes the company’s success with GLP-1 drugs and says the transformation is led by Eli Lilly’s CEO Dave Ricks, of whom, The Economist writes “He wants to turn his company into a different kind of drugmaker: one focused on keeping people healthy rather than simply treating disease, while borrowing ideas about business from Silicon Valley.” The article notes GLP-1s are proving useful beyond their original purpose, reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, sleep apnea and chronic kidney disease, and early evidence suggests they may also help with addiction and psychiatric illness.
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“Ozempic Is Changing More Than Our Bodies." That’s the headline from Psychology Today about a recent study released in PLOS Global Public Health about the psychological impacts of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs across a global cohort including Japan, Denmark, Brazil, and the U.S. One finding is that feeling “normal” can come with emotional costs. “Those who lose a lot of weight often describe an intense sense of relief and happiness at finally ‘feeling normal’ in their bodies. They also report being treated better at work and in social settings,” the scientists write. “At the same time, this improved treatment can sharpen awareness of how devalued they were before they lost significant weight—often a psychologically painful and harmful realization.”
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"This A.I. Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature.” That’s the headline for an article in The New York Times about how scientists trained AI on libraries of DNA and then asked the model to create recipes for viral genomes. Sixteen of them were viable, yielding new viruses. The article points to a study, published in the journal Science detailing how scientists at Stanford University and the Arc Institute, a research organization in Palo Alto, taught AI to recognize patterns of DNA structure in nature, and then to use that data to write recipes for entirely new viruses. The Times notes the good and the bad: “For the first time, scientists have used artificial intelligence to create new kinds of viruses, raising hopes for medical advances while also raising the disturbing possibility that the technology could someday be used to invent dangerous pathogens.”
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“Generative Biology Is Rewriting the Rules of Drug Discovery.”Forbes carries that headline for its look at how generative biology, the use of AI to design molecules and program biological functions, has moved from laboratory promise into clinical testing. The article reads. “Rather than screen whatever nature or a chemical library happens to offer, researchers ask a model to create a molecule with a chosen set of traits.” The article includes a note of caution, which is becoming a refrain whenever such technological advances are discussed: “The same models that can create a therapeutic protein or a new drug candidate may also lower the barrier to engineering dangerous biological systems.”
Barry A. Bunin, PhD, is the Founder & CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery, which provides a modern approach to drug discovery research informatics trusted globally by thousands of leading researchers. The CDD Vault is a hosted biological and chemical database that securely manages your private and external data.