Shafique Virani, chief corporate development officer and interim chief medical officer, Recursion, delves into digital transformation within drug discovery and the power of AI-enabled platforms in the future of therapeutics.
Key insights:
- AI and new computational tools are allowing us to create and analyse broad, high-dimensional datasets that can dramatically accelerate the pace and scale at which we understand and control biology and chemistry.
- By using machine learning algorithms to uncover relationships between the disease model and a library of compounds, led Recursion to identify a chemical entity that had a strong and specific effect in the context of APC mutant genes.
- Recursion created a series of new chemical entities (NCEs) allowed more understanding of a molecule’s interactions. As a result, they developed a lead candidate, REC-3964, non-antibiotic approach to treat C. diff.
Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled drug discovery. Both the number of AI-native companies and the size of their pipelines have increased significantly. According to the 2022 State of AI Report, there are now 18 investigational drugs in clinical studies from AI-native companies. Two years ago, there were none.