AI is reshaping biotech from discovery to clinical success: 9 Insights from the cutting edge
AI is rapidly moving from the edges of biotech into its core, reshaping how companies discover, design and de-risk new medicines. After years of investment and impressive laboratory breakthroughs, the industry is now focused on what it takes to turn computational power into approved therapies — from raising the probability of clinical success to building the data infrastructure that can support the next generation of medicines.
“Most drugs fail in the clinic because we don’t know which patients are most likely to benefit,” said Ron Alfa (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Noetik Inc. “If we can train these models to understand patient biology and increase the probability of success, that’s really the real bottleneck in getting new drugs to patients.”
Alfa and other industry experts spoke to theCUBE’s Gemma Allen in a series of exclusive interviews at theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI in Bio event. The conversations revealed a biotech industry that is becoming more precise, more data-driven and more collaborative than ever before. The new focus is on raising the probability of clinical success and building the infrastructure that can support the next generation of medicines.
Here are nine key insights from the event:
1. Noetik is building digital twins of tumors to raise the odds of clinical success in oncology.
Noetik is training AI models on thousands of real patient tumor samples to create digital twins that can predict which patients are most likely to respond to a given therapy. The company’s focus is deliberately downstream — tackling the 90–95% clinical failure rate rather than only accelerating early discovery — and it recently signed a major non-exclusive partnership with GlaxoSmithKline plc to deploy the technology across the pharma giant’s pipeline, explained Alfa.
Check out theCUBE’s complete interview.
2. ExpressionEdits is rewriting the genetic instructions cells use to make proteins.
ExpressionEdits Ltd. discovered during COVID research that the DNA instructions used to produce therapeutic proteins still resemble 50-year-old viral sequences rather than native human genes, causing cells to silence them. By using AI to redesign these instructions so they look more like natural human genes, the company enables significantly higher protein expression — a critical unlock for gene therapies, vaccines and recombinant protein drugs — and has already secured multiple large pharma partnerships, according to Kärt Tomberg, co-founder and chief executive officer of ExpressionEdits.
Explore the full segment on theCUBE.
3. Sen-Jam Pharmaceutical is targeting inflammaging through AI-driven discovery.
Sen-Jam Pharmaceutical LLC is developing immunomodulators designed to restore the immune system to homeostasis and reduce the chronic inflammation (inflammaging) linked to a majority of age-related diseases and deaths. The company has advanced five assets to Phase 2 using traditional methods and is now applying its AI platform, Galaxy (with Atlas as the discovery layer), which can increase the probability of clinical success by 200–300% based on trial data, said Jim Iversen, chief executive officer of Sen-Jam Pharmaceutical.
Don’t miss the full interview on theCUBE.
4. Manifold Bio is testing thousands of drug designs simultaneously in living systems.
Manifold Biotechnologies Inc. has developed a platform that inverts the traditional drug discovery funnel by measuring hundreds of thousands of AI-designed drug candidates at once inside a single animal rather than testing them one at a time. This high-throughput in vivo approach generates the rich biological data needed to train better models, improve tissue targeting (including crossing the blood-brain barrier) and raise the probability of clinical success, explained Gleb Kuznetsov, co-founder and chief executive officer of Manifold Biotechnologies.
Watch theCUBE’s complete segment.
5. Fauna Bio is mining hibernating animals for drug targets that reverse human disease.
Fauna Bio Inc. studies hibernating mammals that naturally repair heart damage, regrow muscle and reverse neurodegeneration-like pathology, then combines that data with human patient data to identify high-potential drug targets. The biotech company has built a knowledge graph and graph neural network to surface these insights and is advancing its lead heart-failure therapy toward the clinic next year, according to Linda Goodman, co-founder and chief technology officer of the company.
Catch the full story on theCUBE.
6. Concerto Biosciences is putting beneficial bacteria to work against eczema.
Concerto Biosciences Inc. is advancing a once-weekly topical multi-bacterial therapy designed to treat and prevent eczema flares by restoring a healthier skin microbiome. The company, an MIT spin-out, has built a proprietary high-throughput data platform and AI models that predict effective microbial combinations, has completed Phase 1b for its lead eczema program, and is expanding into additional skin and women’s health applications, said Cheri Ackerman Araromi, co-founder and chief executive officer of the company.
View theCUBE’s exclusive interview.
7. Insitro is building a causal AI model of human disease from massive proprietary cellular data.
Insitro Inc. generates vast amounts of fit-for-purpose data by modeling disease in human cells at high throughput, then uses AI and genetics to create a causal model that predicts the effect of intervening at specific genes. This approach aims to identify genetically validated targets with significantly higher probability of clinical success and is already being applied to programs in ALS and other hard-to-treat diseases, explained Mary Rozenman, chief financial officer and chief business officer of Insitro.
Check out the full story on theCUBE.
8. RA Ventures bets on biotech technologies that deliver differentiated drugs, not just better tools.
The only proven business model in biotech remains making successful medicines, so any AI or platform technology must clearly show how it produces a better therapeutic faster than alternatives, says Jacob Oppenheim, venture partner at RA Capital Management L.P. The greatest near-term value of AI lies in expanding the hypothesis space, accelerating experimental cycles and better integrating human genetics data rather than solving only isolated steps in the discovery process, Oppenheim noted.
Watch theCUBE’s full sit-down.
9. Alloy Therapeutics is building the biotech infrastructure layer that powers everyone else’s drug pipelines.
Alloy Therapeutics Inc. is a product development organization that provides proprietary tech-enabled services and technologies spanning discovery to commercialization without owning its own drug pipeline. By aligning its business model with partner success through a mix of services, milestones and royalties, Alloy aims to lower the cost and time of bringing medicines to patients and function as a collaborative “hyperscaler” for the biotech industry, said Errik Anderson, founder, chief executive officer and chairman of Alloy Therapeutics.
See theCUBE’s full coverage. Here’s the complete video playlist from SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI in Bio event:
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