Abbie Fisher, associate at European Intellectual Property Firm, Withers & Rogers, discusses patenting a new frontier in personalised medicine with AI-powered biomarker discovery.
Key insights:
- By harnessing the power of AI approaches such as deep learning, it has been possible to accelerate the process of biomarker discovery.
- Patents can often relate to a novel correlation between a biomarker and a specific medical condition, this can lead to opportunities to patent drugs for use in the treatment of a specific disease or patient sub-group.
- Pembrolizumab marked the first example of regulatory approval by the US Food and Drink Administration for a treatment defined by pan-tumour predictive biomarkers.
In the past five years, there has been a boom in the patenting of biomarkers as diagnostics and targets for use in personalised medicine. Research scientists have been capitalising on advances in the application of AI, especially deep learning, to find new, improved, or repurposed treatments and therapeutics for specific diseases.