AI Driven Drug Development
The Increasing Role of AI Drug Development: The FDA noted a significant uptick in drug and biologic application submissions that incorporate AI/ML, with over 100 in 2021 alone.
What This Looks Like:
AI can process massive quantities of data, identify key trends, and predict potential outcomes. All three of these capabilities could drastically improve drug development.
The design of novel compounds with AI more rapidly and efficiently than traditional methods, promising specific desirable properties and activities.
The mapping of millions of molecules:
like DeepMind's AlphaFold which used AI to predict protein structures from sequences a once impossible task
Side Effect Prediction: ML algorithms can analyze extensive data to identify patterns, significantly speeding up the identification of bioactive compounds with minimal side effects, a normally labor intensive and slow stage of drug development.
Xaira Therapeutics Raises 1 Billion:
Xaira, an AI-driven drug discovery startup, announced its launch this week
Data Utilization: The company aims to generate and use comprehensive datasets covering various biological scales to inform and enhance drug development processes.
They will work to “connect biological targets and engineered molecules to human diseases” - per fierce
Product Development Capabilities: Xaira’s platform allows for development across multiple drug modalities, targeting difficult diseases, with every experiment designed to enrich AI models and biological understanding.
“We have reached the point where AI finally allows us to see biology in new ways, and translate those discoveries to better treatments for disease,”