Here are which companies wink at artificial intelligence that makes science
Science and artificial intelligence, companies are investing more and more in biotech in search of new drugs. News and names
Create new proteins in seconds instead of months. Now it's possible thanks to giant advances in artificial intelligence. A process that until recently took months – as well as being a grueling undertaking with high failure rates – is now a revolutionary reality.
THE TEAM
The announcement was made in Science by a team of researchers led by David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
THE FIRST DRUG WITH PROTEIN DESIGNED BY MAN
In June, reports Nature , South Korean regulators authorized the first-ever drug, a Covid vaccine, made with a new human-engineered protein. The vaccine is based on a spherical protein nanoparticle created by researchers nearly a decade ago.
STEPS FORWARD TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
All this was possible thanks to the giant steps forward made by artificial intelligence. For example, DeepMind protein structure prediction software in July revealed that the latest version of AlphaFold had predicted the structures of all proteins known to science.
WHAT IS GOOGLE'S ALPHAFOLD
AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence system developed by Google's DeepMind and the European molecular biology laboratory (Embl). It can predict the structure of proteins and just last July, one year after its launch, it exposed almost all the proteins (more than 200 million) known to science.
The 3D structures contained in the database are available to the entire scientific community and Science has called it "the greatest scientific discovery of 2021".
WHAT ALPHAFOLD HAS DONE SO FAR
Since AlphaFold was started, writes Wired , "it has helped accelerate research in numerous areas of the life sciences, from developing vaccines for malaria to studying ways to eliminate plastic pollution."
This means that science, thanks to artificial intelligence, will play a key role in global challenges such as sustainability, food security and 'forgotten' diseases.
FROM ALPHAFOLD ONWARDS
In recent months, Nature adds, "there has been an explosive growth in artificial intelligence tools, some of them based on AlphaFold, capable of rapidly inventing completely new proteins."
"After AlphaFold, there has been a change in the way we work on protein design," said Noelia Ferruz, computational biologist at the University of Girona, Spain. We are witnessing very exciting times ”.
WHY CREATE NEW PROTEINS
Efforts so far have focused on creating new proteins, but for what purpose? According to Nature , both researchers and a growing number of companies investing in artificial intelligence would like to design proteins "capable of doing useful things, from cleaning toxic waste to treating disease," thanks to the discovery of new drugs.
WHO INVESTS IN AI FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRUGS
Among the companies working in this direction, Nature says, are DeepMind in London and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta in California.
But in addition to Google's Alphafold, there are also other artificial intelligence start-ups that aim to develop new drugs and which, according to the Financial Times , are raising hundreds of millions of dollars.
OWKIN AND BRISTOL MYERS SQUIBB
French-American artificial intelligence company Owkin, for example, is partnering with US Bristol Myers Squibb "to improve the way the pharmaceutical company designs its trials in a deal worth up to $ 180 million, including milestone payments if drugs overcome regulatory hurdles, ”says the business newspaper.
HOXTON VENTURES AND PEPTONE
Hoxton Ventures invested in Peptone, a London-based start-up that uses machine learning to solve the "messy proteins" that traditional drug discovery methods have struggled to beat. "The company – writes the FT – has announced a 40 million dollar investment, led by the venture capital group for healthcare and technology F-Prime Capital and by Bessemer Venture Partners".
F-PRIME CAPITAL AND CHARM THERAPEUTICS
Biotech F-Prime Capital "co-led a $ 50 million round in another London company, Charm Therapeutics, formed only last September, together with healthcare-focused investor OrbiMed."
Charm Therapeutics uses deep learning on 3D molecular configurations to develop therapeutic molecules designed to target pathogenic proteins.
INSILICO AND BCG
In early June, Insilico, a Hong Kong-based start-up that combines genomics, big data analytics and deep learning for in silico drug discovery, "raised $ 60 million in a round led by BCG [Boston Consulting Group, US multinational strategic consulting, ed ], after a round of 255 million dollars last year ".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/ecco-quali-aziende-ammiccano-intelligenza-artificiale-che-fa-scienza/ on Fri, 23 Sep 2022 05:49:43 +0000.