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.