If the swift succession of announcements coinciding with the 42nd annual JP Morgan Healthcare event this year is any indication, the realm of AI-driven drug discovery is poised for a significant surge in 2024.
An impactful development unfolded yesterday when Isomorphic Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet’s Google, spearheaded by Demis Hassabis, the mastermind behind DeepMind, took the spotlight.
Unique Collaboration with Novartis and Lilly
Isomorphic Labs, headquartered in London, disclosed its strategic alliances with two corporate giants—Novartis and Eli Lilly—with the aim of uncovering small molecule therapeutics targeting a spectrum of ailments. These partnerships, potentially valued at \(3 billion collectively, kick off with an initial payment of \)45 million from Eli Lilly to Isomorphic Labs, alongside a performance-based incentive of up to \(1.7 billion. Novartis, on the other hand, has committed to an upfront payment of \)37.5 million, with an additional $1.2 billion earmarked for future incentives.
The groundbreaking revelation by DeepMind in July 2022, regarding the predictive prowess of its AlphaFold program in determining the structures of nearly all known proteins, marked a pivotal moment in enhancing biological comprehension. This breakthrough significantly accelerated drug discovery and disease treatment. This milestone built upon the groundbreaking work unveiled a month earlier, where DeepMind introduced the AlphaFold method, which successfully mapped 98.5% of the proteins prevalent in the human body, making it open-source.
In 2021, Hassabis established Invertible Labs dedicated to pharmaceutical research. By December 2022, he hinted to the Financial Times about the company’s proximity to securing its maiden commercial proposition, leveraging the AlphaFold breakthrough as the cornerstone of this endeavor as DeepMind’s sibling entity.
Contribution from Nvidia and Recursion in AI-driven Drug Discovery
In July 2023, the Utah-based startup Recursion made headlines by joining forces with Nvidia, with the latter investing $50 million and granting access to BioNeMo, a cloud-based tool vital for AI-fueled drug discovery. Recursion introduced Lowe, a technological platform employing an LLM to empower researchers to query the company’s diverse models for intricate drug discovery tasks, at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.
Chris Gibson, the co-founder and CEO of Recursion, emphasized to Forbes the array of over 20 unique resources developed within the company, acknowledging the complexity in mastering each one. The LLM serves as a conduit to streamline access to these resources, simplifying the process for users.
Nvidia also unveiled that BioNeMo is rolling out alpha versions of sky APIs, integrating them into web interfaces tailored for activities related to novel drug discovery. Kimberly Powell, the vice president of medical at Nvidia, articulated, “Healthcare inherently poses complexities. Hence, our objective is to facilitate researchers’ access to convolutional models for drug development, enabling AI-based inference via web browsers or fog APIs, and refining these models using proprietary data.”
A comprehensive data center platform dubbed NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD is slated for deployment at the Amgen deCODE genetics headquarters in Reykjavik, Iceland. This platform will be instrumental in crafting AI models trained to analyze one of the most extensive individual datasets globally.
Inclusion of Deloitte and EY in the AI-driven Drug Discovery Landscape
The landscape of artificial drug development has witnessed the entry of specialized service titans from the Big Four. Ernst and Young recently unveiled a collaboration with BioPhy, an AI-centric drug development entity, making its technology accessible to EY’s clientele. This collaboration hinges on the foundation of AI.
On a parallel front, Deloitte introduced Atlas AI, a novel drug discovery catalyst aimed at expediting research processes and hastening the introduction of new drugs to the market. This initiative is part of the Quartz AI suite and leverages conceptual AI models made accessible through Nvidia’s BioNeMo.
Dan Ferrante, the managing director of Deloitte Consulting LLP and the AI leader for development and R&D, underscored in a press release the transformative potential of Atlas in amalgamating data, language models, and medical pipelines powered by AI. This amalgamation is poised to revolutionize drug discovery, offering swifter, more streamlined, and precise insights that could accelerate the drug development timeline significantly.
Unveiling Ambiguity Surrounding Business Intentions, Including ByteDance
Certain entities vying for the forefront in AI-driven drug identification harbor ambiguous aspirations. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, appears to be a frontrunner in this domain. As per LinkedIn posts, Forbes recently reported that ByteDance is actively recruiting American talent specializing in mathematical sciences, classical chemistry, chemical dynamics, and related fields for its “AI for Drug Design” and AI for Science divisions.
The “AI for Drug Design” initiative, as delineated in a Forbes publication, aims to revolutionize medicinal discovery by enticing Ph.D. candidates to Silicon Valley. The focus lies in surmounting formidable challenges in protein structure prediction, chemical structure analysis, and mathematical protein design, pushing the boundaries of AI-driven drug design. The overarching goal is to expedite drug discovery processes, leaving a significant imprint on global healthcare by amalgamating academic excellence with the transformative power of AI.
As the curtains draw on the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, the question looms: will the momentum surrounding AI-driven drug development persist? Your insights and feedback are invaluable; feel free to reach out to me at ([email protected]) as I remain vigilant in tracking the latest news and trends.
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