Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery #9

In this week’s news digest, we are reviewing advancements by Deepcell, Zephyr AI, Exscientia, Creyon Bio, VAXIMM, DNAnexus, Lantern Pharma, OccamzRazor, Mytide Therapeutics, and other companies. Artificial intelligence-powered platforms are becoming a norm not only in small molecule drug discovery but increasingly so in biologics discovery and cancer vaccine development.?

AI-driven Deepcell raises $73M to further single-cell imaging tech

Northern California-based Deepcell just raised a $73 million series B round. The company says its AI-powered platform differs from the rest of the field because of its ability to keep whole cells intact through examinations via microfluidics and high-resolution optics. The result is an ever-growing database of whole cells and their phenotype that can better inform biology and cellular mechanisms.

Because Deepcell’s AI-powered technology can isolate and capture virtually any cell population based on morphological features, it can be used for a wide variety of research and translational applications, such as tissue profiling (immunotyping, tumor microenvironment, cytology), cell enrichment (drug development, cell therapy), and rare cell capture (circulating tumor cell isolation, non-invasive prenatal testing, circulating endothelial cell isolation).

NexImmune and Zephyr AI Announce a Strategic Partnership in Oncology for Target Discovery and Validation

NexImmune (Nasdaq: NEXI) and Zephyr AI entered a strategic partnership focusing on the discovery and validation of novel targets for new T-cell-mediated therapies in oncology. Combining Zephyr's proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic technology with NexImmune's Artificial Immune Modulation (AIM) nanoparticle technology, the collaboration has an ambition to identify and validate optimal antigens and antigen cocktails for the development of potential new therapeutics in solid and hematological cancers.?

Zephyr will use its proprietary AI and machine learning technology to identify targets suitable for activating T-cell-mediated anti-tumor responses. Specifically, Zephyr will evaluate a range of molecular and genetic data through in silico target discovery to uncover known, high potential tumor-associated antigens and neoantigens that map to specific subtypes of cancer. NexImmune will screen and validate these targets using its proprietary AIM platform. The collaboration will focus on selecting multiple cognate peptides derived from known tumor-associated antigens and neoantigens to rapidly develop new product candidates for clinical trials in patients with cancer in need of lifesaving treatments.?

Exscientia and University of Oxford Launch “Xcellomics” Program to Expedite Early-Stage Academic Research and Translate Novel Biology Into Future Drug Discovery

Exscientia (Nasdaq: EXAI) and the University of Oxford Target Discovery Institute (Oxford TDI) today announced the formation of Xcellomics – a program designed to source cellular functional assays from the global academic community to develop novel screens and identify targets and therapeutic candidates for unmet medical needs.?

The program offers applicants resources to explore, identify and rapidly advance novel drug targets by leveraging Oxford TDI’s expertise in developing robust, disease-relevant, predictive screening assays and Exscientia’s AI personalised medicine design capabilities.?

Assay submissions will be evaluated and selected by the Xcellomics Scientific Committee and will be developed, produced, and validated within Oxford TDI’s advanced cell screening facility using a range of phenotypic and functional genomic outputs that leverage Exscientia’s technology platform.?

Program open at no-cost to any academic researcher interested in submitting a proposal

Creyon Bio Launches with $40 Million to Engineer Safe, Effective Precision Medicines on Demand for All Patients

Creyon Bio secures $40M in financing led by DCVC Bio and Lux Capital.?The company uses advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence along with optimal purpose-built datasets to connect foundational biophysical properties of oligonucleotide-based medicines (OBMs) chemistry and sequence with accurate predictive models of safety and efficacy. Creyon Bio's purpose-built datasets are orders-of-magnitude more efficient than using retrospective or ad-hoc screening data for building predictive models. This allows Creyon Bio to develop models to engineer optimal OBMs across a broad range of molecular modalities from single-stranded antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) that reduce gene expression levels or change splicing events, to small interfering RNA (siRNA), to DNA and RNA editing systems, to even targeting aptamers.

NEC OncoImmunity Acquires VAXIMM’s Neoantigen Vaccine Development Assets

The AI technology can be used to identify optimal neoantigen targets for personalized cancer vaccines and cell therapies in a clinically actionable timeframe, and also facilitate effective patient selection for cancer immunotherapy.

Basel-based biotech company Vaximm has agreed on a collaboration with IT company NEC. Vaximm wants to develop personalized cancer vaccines using NEC’s artificial intelligence (AI)-based prediction system.?

Under a new agreement, NEC Oncoimmunity (NOI), a subsidiary of NEC Corporation, acquires VAXIMM’s neoantigen vaccine-related patents, license the requisite manufacturing patents, and will take over several existing contracts with key collaborators and partners. VAXIMM retains rights to its first-in-class oral T-cell activation platform technology and all other product candidates, including VXM01, which is being developed for the treatment of glioblastoma.

DNAnexus Raises $200M Financing, with Platform Expansion in Mind

Cloud-based biomedical data analysis software developer DNAnexus completed a $200 million financing that will help it accelerate the development of its core genomics and multi-omics platform, continue its international growth, and support the integration of new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies and tools.

Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, DNAnexus focuses on advancing precision medicine by enabling customers to glean insights from large-scale genomic, multi-omic, and clinical datasets. The platform now stores more than 65 petabytes of data—a number that has grown 70% per year since 2015.

Lantern Pharma to Present Positive Preclinical Data on the Effectiveness of LP-184 in Brain Metastases

Lantern Pharma (NASDAQ: LTRN), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company using its proprietary RADR? artificial intelligence and machine learning platform to improve oncology drug discovery and development, announced that it will present positive preclinical data on the in vitro efficacy of its drug candidate LP-184 in brain metastases (mets) at the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting, April 8-13th, 2022.

LP-184 is a small molecule drug candidate and next-generation acylfulvene that preferentially damages DNA in cancer cells that overexpress certain biomarkers and is therefore lethal in tumors that harbor mutations or deficiencies in DNA repair pathways. LP-184 has already been demonstrated preclinically to have potent efficacy in several targeted central nervous system (CNS) cancer indications, including glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) and atypical teratoid rhomboid tumors (ATRT). The development promise for LP-184 in these indications is strengthened by LP-184's favorable blood brain barrier (BBB) permeability. LP-184 has also demonstrated potent tumor cell killing capabilities in vitro and in animal xenografts of tumors such as lung, breast, melanoma and colon, many of which frequently metastasize to the brain. The tumor specificity of LP-184 is driven by expression levels of PTGR1, and Lantern's RADR? analysis indicates that such expression levels are retained in brain mets of these primary tumors.

OccamzRazor announces closing of $6.1M financing round to launch their AI-enabled discovery pipeline and advance preclinical development in Parkinson's

A key accomplishment in using the OccamzRazor platform has been the discovery and initial validation of novel target genes for the treatment of Parkinson's disease — a breakthrough finding accelerated by AI to months rather than years.

By combining graph machine learning (RazorBrain?), graph prediction (RazorLink?), and natural language processing (RazorPanorama?), OccamzRazor generates testable, data-driven hypotheses that increase success rates and reduce costs in neurodegenerative drug development.

OccamzRazor has raised a total of $12M and has been supported by the Michael J Fox Foundation and the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT. The company is headquartered at Johnson & Johnson's innovation hub J-LABS in New York City.

Mytide Therapeutics Raises $7 Million Series A Round to Transform Peptide Manufacturing with Machine Learning

Mytide Therapeutics, a company transforming peptide manufacturing with predictive analytics and machine learning, has raised $7 million in Series A financing. This financing will allow Mytide to scale its AI-enabled Gen2 platform to support cost-effective, scalable, and decentralized manufacturing for a wide-variety of peptide and peptide conjugate applications for therapeutic discovery and personal peptide vaccines (PPV).?

Mytide’s Gen2 platform produces both natural and non-natural peptides 30-times faster than traditional manufacturing practices by eliminating bottlenecks throughout the entire process of synthesis, analysis, purification, and lyophilization. Through rigorous in-process data collection, Mytide’s continuously learning AI-guided engine enables higher purity, production reliability, and speed, by controlling a proprietary set of chemical processes, analytical tools, and robotics. These tools enable access to a novel peptide space including difficult-to-manufacture non-canonical amino acids, constrained peptides, and short-proteins that are inaccessible or uneconomical to produce and screen using traditional peptide manufacturing processes.?

If you want to get deep insights into the market of artificial intelligence in the pharmaceutical industry and biotech, check out the industry's leading report on the topic: The Landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI) In Pharmaceutical R&D.

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-- Andrii