Barry Bunin, PhD
Founder & CEO
Collaborative Drug Discovery
“Anthropic Launches AI Drug Discovery Program, Joining Tech Giants in Betting on Healthcare.” CNBC reports that Anthropic is starting an internal drug discovery program as part of an effort to develop artificial intelligence tools for drugmakers, making it the latest company to try to crack the healthcare market. “We’re doing this because we believe first and foremost that to build the right models, products and tools to accelerate the industry, we need to live it along with all of you,” said Eric Kauderer-Abrams, the company’s life sciences head. “We believe in the power of tight feedback loops, and there’s no substitute for having our own experiences alongside you all in the trenches trying to develop drugs.”
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"Jeff Bezos Wants to Build an ‘Artificial General Engineer.’”
The New York Times reports on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ plans to develop what he calls an ‘artificial general engineer’—an AI system intended to automate aspects of engineering design and manufacturing. The effort will come from his new startup Prometheus. The New York Times reports that “Backed by more than $12 billion in funding at a reported $41 billion valuation, the company intends to create new engineering tools using many of the techniques used to build chatbots and other A.I. technologies. The hope is that these automated systems will improve the design and manufacture of practically any device, from computers to jet engines.” TechCrunch reports that a Prometheus artificial general engineer will be “capable of automating the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems, from jet engines to drug compounds.”
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“How I Use AI to Turn Failed Drugs into New Medicines.” That’s the headline for a Nature article about Ignota Labs, a company based in Cambridge, UK, that uses artificial-intelligence technology to determine why drugs have failed in clinical trials, before re-engineering the most promising therapies to give them another shot at making it to the patients who need them. “We have built an AI-driven platform to identify failed drugs and fix their toxicity issues,” says Layla Hosseini-Gerami, the company’s Chief Data Science Officer. Dr. Hosseini-Gerami explains, ‘First, it narrows down thousands of failed drugs to the most promising: the drugs that have huge potential to make a difference to patients but which have hit an unexpected safety issue; for example, causing toxicity in the liver. Next, we apply deep learning, combining bioinformatics, chemoinformatics and multimodal data to understand the root cause of the safety issue and to develop mitigation strategies. Our core aim is to take these drugs, make minimal chemical changes and get them back into the clinic as efficiently as possible.’ Hosseini-Gerami contrasts this approach with conventional drug repurposing, in which the same molecule is investigated for a new indication without structural modification.
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The Hill shares a policy update to speed up early stage clinical trials at the FDA to keep abreast of other countries. The Hill carries a story on the FDA’s new initiative to speed up early-stage clinical trials as part of an effort to reduce development timelines and reverse a growing trend of companies moving overseas. The pilot program, part of a broader initiative across the Department of Health and Human Services known as “Operation TrialBlazer,” could reduce early trial timelines by 6 to 12 months, officials said. The FDA also released revised draft guidance clarifying that one high-quality late-stage clinical trial with confirmatory evidence will be sufficient to support approval in many cases. The article quotes acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas as saying: “We’ve been witness to a growing share of phase 1 clinical trials moving overseas...FDA is taking action to reverse that trend.”
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.