Can AI Be Used To Develop New Medication?
Date posted:
News
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become ever more intriguing parts of life science marketing, as well as research and development, but one area where we may potentially see a giant leap forward in their use is in biotech.
One company claims that they can use machine learning principles applied to genomics to create new drugs to treat a wide variety of diseases, and given that they have just received over $43m in Series A funding, it appears that investors share that belief too.
The theory behind machine learning being able to brute force some of life sciences’ greatest questions is not entirely new. AI has been increasingly used in the diagnosis of cancer cells in patients, diagnosing heart conditions and strokes, among many other functions.
The aim of the company, a Singapore and San-Francisco based company known as Engine Biosciences, is to develop two software platforms that can help test billions of gene interactions and test these gene interactions in diseased cells.
The first is NetMAPPR, which is a searchable platform that tests drug targets and gene combinations that are integral to tackling diseases.
The other is CombiGEM, which exponentially speeds up the experimentation process by allowing for hundreds of thousands of gene combinations to be tested quickly and with a higher rate of accuracy, with successful tests further increasing the accuracy of future experiments.
Currently, the business has created a pipeline of novel treatments for tackling ovarian, breast and liver cancers, and this extra funding is set to allow them to future explore other disease areas and progress their drug discovery programmes.