Exscientia wants to bring its AI/ML approach into the world of biologics. It's starting with antibodies

• Read original article here

Sanofi, Ex­sci­en­tia ink the next AI megadeal, sign­ing terms on a $100M up­front pact with up to 15 drugs on the line
CEO An­drew Hop­kins tells End­points News that the main goal of this ex­pan­sion was to take the “nat­ur­al next step” as a com­pa­ny.
“And that’s why we’re mov­ing and ex­pand­ing from small mol­e­cules al­so go­ing to in­clude bi­o­log­ics…It’s about how we could po­ten­tial­ly dou­ble the tar­get uni­verse we could go af­ter with our tech­nol­o­gy, when we think about all the pos­si­ble an­ti­body and bi­o­log­ic tar­gets we could go af­ter, as well as small mol­e­cule tar­gets,” Hop­kins said.
The AI chief added that the heart of the ex­pan­sion is around a new en­gine that Ex­sci­en­tia’s chief sci­en­tist of bi­o­log­ics AI, Char­lotte Deane, and her team have been work­ing on de­vel­op­ing. Deane, who joined Ex­sci­en­tia ear­li­er this year, is the for­mer head of Ox­ford’s sta­tis­tics de­part­ment.
Hop­kins said that the goal of this new en­gine was to not have just an AI plat­form, but an au­to­mat­ed lab­o­ra­to­ry sys­tem that can have con­tin­u­al back-and-forth be­tween gen­er­at­ing an­ti­body de­signs and then phys­i­cal­ly test­ing them in the lab — “bi­o­log­ics by de­sign, not dis­cov­ery,” Hop­kins quipped.
Ex­sci­en­tia has al­ready start­ed look­ing at an­ti­bod­ies from Sanofi’s pipeline, Hop­kins said, es­sen­tial­ly ap­ply­ing a pre­ci­sion med­i­cine plat­form to iden­ti­fy bio­mark­ers and fur­ther iden­ti­fy the pa­tient pop­u­la­tions for these an­ti­bod­ies to move for­ward in­to clin­i­cal test­ing.
The first step of the process is think­ing about which tar­gets to go af­ter, Hop­kins said, in­clud­ing iden­ti­fy­ing the epi­tope, the part of the pro­tein se­quence the an­ti­body needs to tar­get. Then comes de­sign­ing spe­cif­ic an­ti­bod­ies from scratch, de no­vo, that could try to go af­ter that spe­cif­ic epi­tope in a vir­tu­al li­brary.
Fi­nal­ly there’s the pro­duc­tion of those an­ti­bod­ies that can be test­ed in the re­al world. Re­searchers ex­am­ine how the an­ti­bod­ies bind, as well as the prop­er­ties of said an­ti­bod­ies. That ties in with new, in-house tech be­ing de­vel­oped that would al­low for high­er through­put and, ac­cord­ing to Hop­kins, for more da­ta gen­er­a­tion that can be fed in­to Ex­sci­en­tia’s ma­chine learn­ing mod­els, form­ing a pos­i­tive feed­back loop.
As for what’s next, Hop­kins says that the out­fit has al­ready start­ed work­ing on the en­gi­neer­ing — de­sign­ing and com­mis­sion­ing the tech­nol­o­gy re­quired to get the au­to­mat­ed lab up and run­ning. The first projects, how­ev­er, are un­der­way, with Ex­sci­en­tia work­ing with var­i­ous undis­closed part­ners.
“We do hope this will be a sig­nif­i­cant part of ac­cent­ing this pipeline go­ing for­ward in the fu­ture,” Hop­kins con­clud­ed.
AUTHOR
Editor & Founder
So much for Rubius II.
A little more than a year after the one-time Flagship star $RUBY looked to restructure around a second try at making red blood cells a drug tech of the future, the biotech put out word after the market closed Wednesday that it’s axing the bulk of the remaining staff and looking for a sale or merger.
With shares trading slightly north of 30 cents apiece, it won’t take much to take over the crumbling structure that once commanded a market valuation in the billions.
Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription
Unlock this story instantly and join 152,700+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free.
SIGN UP