AI-driven new drug development eight major financing new list
November 27, 2018 Source: WuXi PharmaTech
Window._bd_share_config={ "common":{ "bdSnsKey":{ },"bdText":"","bdMini":"2","bdMiniList":false,"bdPic":"","bdStyle":" 0","bdSize":"16"},"share":{ }};with(document)0[(getElementsByTagName('head')[0]||body).appendChild(createElement('script')) .src='http://bdimg.share.baidu.com/static/api/js/share.js?v=89860593.js?cdnversion='+~(-new Date()/36e5)];With the continuous advancement of science and technology, more and more companies are using artificial intelligence to accelerate the drug discovery process and improve the success rate of drug research. In 2018, this trend became more "hot" as the number of investments and other important events increased. This article is here to sort out the “Heavy Head†financing incident of startups using artificial intelligence to drive new drug research and development since January 2018.
Engine Biosciences
In January of this year, San Francisco-based biotechnology company Engine Biosciences announced that it had completed a $10 million financing. This round of funding will support several of Core's core efforts, including building a drug discovery platform, expanding its research and execution teams in Singapore and San Francisco, and conducting preclinical research within the company and with partners.
Engine Biosciences is committed to using artificial intelligence to improve the drug discovery process. The company has developed a biomedical platform that uses artificial intelligence technology to enable researchers and drug developers to reveal the genetic interaction mechanisms and biological networks behind the disease faster and more efficiently than traditional methods. Therapy, as well as analysis and prediction of precision medicine applications.
twoXAR
twoXAR is a biopharmaceutical company that uses artificial intelligence technology. The company announced in March that it had received a $10 million investment to build the company's drug discovery pipeline and accelerate the preclinical development of existing drug candidates. The investment was led by Softbank Ventures, an early venture capital firm in Softbank. Other participating companies include Andreessen Horowitz Bio Fund and OS Fund. twoXAR has previously received $4.3 million in seed round financing from investment institutions such as Andreessen Horowitz, CLI Ventures and Stanford-StartX Fund.
The twoXAR uses its unique artificial intelligence platform to quickly identify candidate drugs for in vivo testing. This process would have taken years to complete, and twoXAR's artificial intelligence platform can reduce it to weeks. Moreover, in the treatment of diseases such as liver cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and type 2 diabetes, the success rate of using the platform for in vivo testing is significantly higher than that of conventional therapy. Through a variety of collaborations with biopharmaceutical companies, drug developers and investors, twoXAR is building a new drug candidate development pipeline.
BenevolentAI
In April of this year, Benevolent AI, based in London, UK, announced that it raised $115 million from new and old investors, raising its previous valuation to $2 billion. This is one of the biggest financings in the AI ​​pharmaceutical industry. Since its inception in 2013, the company has raised more than $200 million in funding.
BenevolentAI is committed to the application of artificial intelligence to develop new drugs for difficult diseases. It is the first fully integrated AI company with both drug discovery and clinical development capabilities. BenevolentAI's advanced technology breaks the traditional model of the pharmaceutical industry with lower cost, higher success rate and shorter development process. BenevolentAI's current portfolio of drug discovery products shows that it can reduce the time of early drug development by four years and has the potential to increase the average efficiency of drug development by 60% throughout the drug development process.
Atomwise
In May of this year, Atomwise in Silicon Valley, Calif., announced the completion of a $45 million Series A financing. Founded in 2012, Atomwise's core technology is AtomNet, a virtual drug discovery platform technology based on deep learning neural networks that enables the discovery and design of small molecule drugs with unprecedented speed, accuracy and diversity. . It is estimated that current high-throughput screening robots can screen 100,000 compounds per day, and Atomwise's algorithm can increase this number to 10 to 20 million per day, an increase of two orders of magnitude.
In the past few years, this platform has achieved excellent results. On Atomwise's official website, we saw an example of this: Using its unique technology, Atomwise found a protein interaction inhibitor in 8.2 million small molecules that is expected to be used in the treatment of multiple sclerosis. Under the design of AI, this new drug molecule has many excellent drug-forming properties - it can be used orally, and it can penetrate the insurmountable blood-brain barrier. In the animal model, it shows a good effect.
Owkin
In May of this year, a new medical research platform using artificial intelligence technology, OWKIN announced that Google's venture capital company GV participated in the company's A round of financing. To date, OWKIN's Series A financing totaled $18 million. In addition to GV, investors include Otium, Cathay Innovation and NJF Captial.
OWKIN was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in New York, USA. OWKIN's proprietary platform is called OWKIN Socrates, which uses deep learning algorithms to help researchers in the academic, hospital and pharmaceutical industries develop predictive models and accelerate drug development to advance medical research. At the same time, OWKIN is committed to using machine learning techniques to integrate biomedical imaging, genomics and clinical data to discover biomarkers and mechanisms associated with disease and treatment outcomes.
BenchSci
BenchSci, a bio-product search engine company focused on the development of artificial intelligence, announced in May that it had received $8 million in Series A funding. This round of investment was led by iNovia Capital, which included companies such as Google's artificial intelligence venture capital fund, Gradient Ventures, and Golden Venture Partners, Afore Capital, Real Ventures and Radical Ventures.
BenchSci has built an artificial intelligence-driven platform that provides reference material in relevant scientific articles in digital form so that researchers can validate their hypotheses. By browsing a large body of scientific literature and using a smart computer program based on supervised machine learning to retrieve every detail of an antibody, BenchSci researchers can find antibodies that can be used under any unique experimental conditions. It is 24 times faster than existing methods, and the cost is only 75% of the current.
Insilico Medicine
In June of this year, Insilico Medicine, a new generation of artificial intelligence company in the United States, announced the completion of a new round of strategic financing led by WuXi PharmaTech Venture Capital Fund. Headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, Insilico Medicine focuses on a new generation of artificial intelligence technologies such as deep learning for target recognition, drug discovery, and anti-aging research.
Insilico Medicine is the first in the world to use the Generated Confrontation Network (GAN) and Intensive Learning (RL) to develop new drug molecules that can be applied to both known target diseases and diseases of unknown targets. In addition to working with large companies to develop drugs, Insilico Medicine also conducts drug discovery projects internally, focusing on cancer, skin diseases, fibrosis, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, gradual freezing, diabetes, and sarcopenia. And new drug development for aging.
Verge Genomics
In July, Verge Genomics, a drug research and development company that used machine learning algorithms to develop new therapies, announced the completion of a $32 million Series A round of financing. The round of financing was led by DFJ Ventures, and innovative biotech investment funds such as Pharmacocond Ventures Fund, ALS Investment Fund, Agent Capital and OS Fund also participated in this round of financing. This round of oversubscription has enabled Verge Genomics to raise more than $36 million in total funding to date.
Founded in 2015, Wisdom Gene is committed to accelerating drug development through the use of specialized technologies in machine learning, neuroscience and experimental biology. The company pioneered a leading treatment program in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson's disease, and has established partnerships with two pharmaceutical companies. At the same time, Wisdom has put a lot of effort into creating its proprietary data sets. Through partnerships with more than a dozen top academic organizations and government agencies, the company has established one of the largest and most comprehensive genomic databases for patients with ALS and Parkinson's disease in the field.
More and more AI startups have emerged in 2018 and have begun to emerge in the field of new drug research and development. We wish that in the future, these cutting-edge companies will continue to shine and bring more innovative therapies and pharmaceutical products to patients around the world!
Reference source:
[1] 2018: AI Is Surging In Drug Discovery Market. Retrieved November 23, 2018, from https://
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