AI Pharma Deals: AstraZeneca and AI Startups

AI Drug Discovery

By Marina T AlamanouPublished 3 years ago • Updated 2 years ago • 12 min read

AI Pharma Deals: AstraZeneca and AI Startups

AI/ML Drug Discovery and AstraZeneca

Right now, it takes on average more that 10 years (sometimes nearly 15 years) to bring a new drug to the market with the cost of developing a new prescription drug that gains market approval being approximately $2.6 billion💵, while an astonishing proportion of this money is lost in the 90% of drug candidates that fail during the drug development process.

For this reason, the pharmaceutical companies are incorporating AI/ML in every step of the R&D chain – from drug discovery to launch – to make this process safer, quicker and less costly. At the same time, pharmas are promoting the evolution of their business models towards a more "collaboration" and less silos mentality.

As a matter of fact, a new project called MELLODDY (a consortium of academics and pharmas) aims to leverage the world’s largest collection of small molecules with known biochemical or cellular activity to enable more accurate predictive models and increase efficiencies in drug discovery, by using ML models on decentralised data of 10 pharmaceutical companies, like AstraZeneca, without exposing proprietary information (blockchain).

Apart Melloddy, AstraZeneca has joined also an academic/industry (pharmas) ML/AI consortium with MIT called MLPDS: Machine Learning in Pharmaceutical Discovery and Synthesis (MLPDS) Consortium. The goal of the consortium is to leverage the respective expertise of its members to design and deliver software tools that predict molecular properties and synthetic routes to increase the speed and efficiency of drug discovery.

Additionally, AstraZeneca is involved in the AI centre: Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine, a collaboration between AstraZeneca, the University of Cambridge and GSK, that combines world-class academia with real-world industrial challenges and aims to develop cutting-edge AI to transform the way we discover and develop medicines.

AstraZeneca announced also in 2019 three large-scale initiatives (New Global R&D Centre, AI Innovation Centre and a joint investment fund with CICC/China International Capital Corporation Limited) in China (in Shanghai) making a $1 billion💵 capital infusion into Chinese biotech innovations. Since China is already the second market for AstraZeneca after the US and sales in China continue to grow.

Finally, on February 16 2021 AstraZeneca announced a collaboration with Mila – a Quebec AI Institute – to drive forward AI innovation in healthcare for drug discovery and development, to better understand disease, augment drug design and streamline big data analytics for image analysis, clinical trials and precision medicine.

“With the combined strengths of pharmaceutical and digital intelligence communities, AI has the potential to bring forward transformative solutions that will have a meaningful and sustainable impact, while delivering significant value to healthcare.” – Stéphane Létourneau, Executive Vice-President, Mila

Let's see now the collaborations of AstraZeneca with AI startups

🖊🖥💊 In 2019, AstraZeneca announced a collaboration with BenevolentAI in order to use ML and AI to discover potential new drugs for chronic kidney disease and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

“The vast amount of data available to research scientists is growing exponentially each year. By combining AstraZeneca’s disease area expertise and large, diverse datasets with BenevolentAI’s leading AI and machine learning capabilities, we can unlock the potential of this wealth of data to improve our understanding of complex disease biology and identify new targets that could treat debilitating diseases.” – Mene Pangalos, executive vice president and president BioPharmaceuticals R&D

Now nearly two years after, AstraZeneca and BenevolentAI announced on January 27 2021 that they’ve discovered a winner, an AI-generated target (in the underlying cellular mechanism that cause chronic kidney disease), selected by the drugmaker as a new goal for its portfolio. This novel AI generated target was predicted by the Benevolent Platform®, and was subsequently biologically validated through AstraZeneca's rigorous experimental testing.

UK-based BenevolentAI 🚀 (founded 2013) is using AI for scientific data mining, data contextualisation and deriving hypotheses. They have developed the Benevolent Platform®, a drug discovery platform built on powerful data foundations with state of the art ML and AI technology, that empowers scientists to decipher the vast and complex code underlying human biology, to find new ways to treat disease and promote personalised medicine. The company is headquartered in London with a research facility in Cambridge (UK), a further office in New York and evolved from text mining and semantic linking into knowledge graphs. BenevolentAI has raised a total of $292M💵 in funding over 3 rounds.

🖊🖥💊 In 2020, AstraZeneca announced a collaboration with ProteinQure to apply structure-based design to the creation of therapeutic libraries with of peptide therapeutics. By integrating high-accuracy biophysical models and ML, it is possible to explore this vast therapeutic space and design peptide libraries with broad applicability in drug discovery. The collaboration will leverage ProteinQure's expertise in computational methods and structure-based drug design and AstraZeneca will conduct experimental validation, drawing on the company’s extensive expertise in biologics.

"State-of-the-art computational tools have not been fully explored in biologics R&D and we are excited to partner with AstraZeneca with the aim of discovering novel therapeutic leads for some of the most challenging drug targets faced by the industry." – Chris Ing, CSO, ProteinQure

ProteinQure 🚀 (Toronto, Canada 2017) is combining quantum computing, reinforcement learning and atomistic simulations to design novel protein drugs, by modelling essential processes, such as protein folding and the underlying physics of interactions between biomolecules. Using their proprietary algorithms and external supercomputing resources, ProteinQure can design small peptide-based therapeutics (including cyclic peptides), and explore protein structures without known crystal structures. They work on treatments for cancer, diabetes, asthma and cardiovascular diseases among others, and partner with industry leaders in drug discovery to generate novel therapeutics outside of the conventional chemical space. ProteinQure has raised a total of $4.6M💵 in funding over 3 rounds.

🖊🖥💊 In 2017, BERG announced a research collaboration with AstraZeneca to identify and evaluate novel targets and therapeutics to treat neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Under this research arrangement, AstraZeneca will initially provide BERG with its curated library of central nervous system optimised fragments, to assist in discovering drug candidates for therapeutic development.

“For the past decade, BERG has been at the forefront of using artificial intelligence for drug discovery, and we’re excited to partner with AstraZeneca, which has been an industry leader in discovering and developing therapeutics to improve patient care in neuroscience.” – Niven R. Narain, BERG Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer

BERG Health 🚀 (Massachusetts US, 2006) is a data driven biological research and biopharma company, that offers drug discovery and diagnostic developments services. They analyse data from patient samples in both healthy and diseased states to generate novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets. In BERG’s current clinical pipeline: samples are collected from diseased and healthy patients, subjected to omics analysis (genomics, proteomics, lipidomics and metabolomics) and then the data is combined with patient clinical information and finally analysed by BERG’s proprietary AI analytics platform. For exampe, BERG’s Interrogative Biology® platform discovered BPM 42522, its lead discovery molecule and mechanism of action leading to its anti-cancer properties, and validation of BERG’s pan-cancer model was done in an independent study (Behan FM et al., Nature, 2019 Apr 10).

🖊🖥💊 In 2020, Schrödinger announced an expanded collaboration with AstraZeneca focused on refining a biologics modeling solution with the aim of speeding up the development of antibody and protein-based therapeutic candidates. During the multi-year agreement AstraZeneca will deploy Schrödinger’s computational platform to advance small molecule drug discovery efforts, enhancing Schrödinger’s Free Energy Perturbation (FEP+) technology for the optimisation of key properties of biologics, such as affinity and selectivity, with particular focus on binding affinity.

“This expansion of our collaboration with AstraZeneca has the potential to transform biologics research by further extending the power of physics-based computational modeling to the design of antibodies and protein therapeutics. It’s an exciting collaboration that underscores our commitment to continue investing in research to extend the reach of our industry-leading platform.” – Robert Abel, Ph.D., EVP of Science, Schrödinger

Schrödinger 🚀(New York US, 1990) is involved in computational drug designing for pharmaceutical and biotechnology research (chemical simulation software). It provides platforms to conquer drug discovery, materials research and molecular modeling. Schrödinger’s platform aims to predict how strongly a potential drug will bind and affect a target protein with the goal of optimising its chemical properties and reducing the number of compounds that need to be synthesised before settling on a lead candidate. Schrödinger has raised a total of $562.3M💵 in funding over 8 rounds, has a post-money valuation in the range of $500M to $1B💵 as of May 20, 2019 and has had 1 exit, which was Morphic Therapeutic, a biotechnology company developing a new generation of oral integrin therapies.

🖊🖥💊 In 2018, AstraZeneca announced a strategic collaboration with Alibaba’s Ali Health and Tencent. Its tie-up with Tencent involves harnessing the power of big data to fight online sales of counterfeit drugs while the collaboration with Alibaba’s Ali Health will leverage the latter’s expertise in the internet and AI, focused on smart health services which include patient education, chronic disease prevention and management, as well as future AI-assisted clinical screening and diagnosis.

Alibaba’s Ali Health 🚀 (Alibaba Health Information Technology) is a company (Hong Kong 1998) that helps people get health insurance and get treatment as well. It offers product tracking and logistics information services to manufacturers, and product information and authentication services to consumers, as well asproduct identification, authentication, and tracking systems principally for the drug industry. The company’s PIATS is also used for food and beverage, cosmetics and agricultural resources products. Alibaba Health Information Technology has raised a total of $290M💵 in funding over 1 round. 🚀 Tencent (Shenzhen, Guangdong, China, 1998) is an internet service portal offering value-added internet, mobile, telecom and online advertising services. Tencent Holdings has raised a total of $6.6B💵 in funding over 5 rounds.

🖊🖥💊 In 2012, Conformetrix Ltd (now C4X Discovery) and AstraZeneca announced that they have signed a research collaboration agreement under which Conformetrix’s proprietary NMR-based technology will be applied across AstraZeneca’s pre-clinical therapeutic pipeline to enhance lead discovery and hit identification.

"We believe that this deal provides important validation of our technology, which improves the quality and efficiency of drug discovery, reducing the number of molecules needed to find a drug and enhancing the likelihood of clinical success. The Conformetrix team is looking forward to working with our new partner on this exciting programme." – Conformetrix’s CEO, Dr Sam Williams

C4X Discovery (formerly Conformetrix) 🚀 (Manchester, United Kingdom, 2007) brings a new dimension to drug discovery by using its unique NMR-based technique to determine 3D molecular structures with high accuracy. C4X Discovery is focused on optimising the design and development of medicines and partnering with the pharmaceutical sector to generate better, safer products. In 2018, they successfully out-licensed a pre-clinical programme in addictive disorders to Indivior. Under the terms of the agreement, C4XD will receive an upfront payment of $10 million💵 and could receive up to $284 million💵 of potential development, regulatory and commercialisation milestones in addition to royalties. C4X Discovery has raised a total of £5M💵 in funding over 2 rounds.

🖊🖥💊 In 2019, Gatehouse Bio announced a collaboration with AstraZeneca to explore the identification of new targets for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases using Gatehouse Bio’s AI powered platform. Gatehouse Bio’s RNAlytics platform identifies novel small RNA (sRNA) signatures and illuminates molecular pathways correlated to and potentially driving disease.

“The collaboration with AstraZeneca furthers our vision for next-gen therapeutics, delivering ultra-precise targeting of the right therapy to the right patient at the right time. We are continuing our solid track record of execution, building on our initial research in neurology which received a letter of support from the FDA earlier in the year.” –Neal Foster, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer

Gatehouse Bio 🚀 (Massachusetts, United States, 2016) is a biotechnology company using a technology that is based on a patented, revolutionary approach to uncover small RNA (sRNA) signatures of disease using ML. sRNA signatures provide a platform for drug discovery and drug repurposing, and have been validated in cardiology, neurology, oncology, respiratory and rare diseases by industry leaders and the FDA. Gatehouse Bio has raised a total of $5.4M💵 in funding over 1 round.

🖊🖥💊 In 2019, AstraZeneca announced a collaboration with DeepMatter to improve the productivity and reproducibility of compound synthesis by combining the pharma's automated compound synthesis platform with DeepMatter’s DigitalGlassware™ data collection and structuring technology, through a collaboration whose value was not disclosed.

“We’ve been impressed with the automated chemistry platforms developed at AstraZeneca sites for autonomous delivery of new lead series. We see an opportunity to draw together knowledge from the DigitalGlassware platform to enable machine learning and AI technologies to increase the certainty of producing a high quality and choice of candidate drug molecules.” – DeepMatter CEO Mark Warne, PhD

DeepMatter 🚀 (Glasgow, Scotland 2015) is a big data and analysis company which has built a platform - DigitalGlassware™, focused on enabling reproducibility in chemistry. DeepMatter is at the forefront of the digitisation of chemistry. DeepMatter Group has raised 1 round. DeepMatter Group has acquired 2 organizations: their most recent acquisition was Infochem (a software company focusing on the production and marketing of new products for chemical information) on Dec 20, 2018 for $2M💵.

🖊🖥💊 Finally, in January 2021 AstraZeneca teamed up with AliveCor, a maker of artificial intelligence-enabled personal ECG device (electrocardiogram), in an effort to study new ways of managing cardio, renal and metabolic issues.

"By collaborating across industries, AliveCor is leading the way in the development of non- invasive, more accessible medical solutions for patients and health organizations worldwide. Our collaboration with AstraZeneca exemplifies how pharmaceutical and digital health companies can work together to drive the future of medicine." – Aman Bhatti, Head of BioPharma Relationships at AliveCor

AliveCor 🚀 (California US, 2010) is a FDA-cleared mobile heart solution that helps save lives. They have a device (Kardia-K AI) and application that will turn any smartphone into a clinical-quality electrocardiogram (ECG) recorder. AliveCor has raised a total of $154.3M 💵 in funding over 7 rounds and has a post-money valuation in the range of $100M to $500M as of Nov 16, 2020.

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