With artificial intelligence (AI) being a hot topic in 2023, drug discovery service firms were seen increasingly turning to the exciting and rapidly evolving AI-led design for a distinct competitive advantage.

At the beginning of December, Merck KGaA launched a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to integrate drug discovery and synthesis. Combining generative AI, machine learning, and computer-aided drug design, the software identifies compounds from over 60 billion possibilities that have key properties of a successful drug, such as non-toxicity, solubility, and stability in the body. The platform then proposes ways to best synthesize these drugs.

A couple of months earlier, the Darmstadt, Germany-based company had announced partnerships with BenevolentAI and Exscientia to access end-to-end AI platform capabilities from these two leading AI-led biopharma drug discovery firms from UK for generating novel development candidates in oncology, neurology, and immunology.

Another UK-based drug discovery company, Intelligent Omics, allied with Janssen Research & Development, one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, to evaluate novel biological targets for the treatment of hematological cancers in the same month. Intellomx’s proprietary AI platform integrates multi-omics data and deep learning algorithms to uncover novel disease mechanisms.

It was around the same time that Verge Genomics, a south San Fransisco-headquartered, AI-powered, all-in human biotech firm came out with its multi-target collaboration with Alexion, AstraZeneca Rare Disease to pinpoint novel drug targets for rare neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases. Verge offers an end-to-end discovery platform that combines human genomics with advanced computational tools to predict new drugs with a higher probability of clinical success and rapidly advance the candidates.

Fast-tracking of the development of new biopharma medicines by leveraging technologies had been the key objective for Grifols too as the Spanish pharma major entered a collaboration agreement with Google Cloud in October.

Google Cloud launched two new AI-powered tools in May that will help pharma and biotech companies predict and understand the structure of proteins, a vital part of drug development.

The year 2023 also found a spurt in the uptake of Logica, an AI-powered drug discovery services platform launched by Wilmington, MA-headquartered Charles River a year ago, in partnership with Valo Health, a data-driven AI company. 

Among them is Somerville, MA-based Aitia, a leader in the application of causal AI and digital twins. The company is deploying Logica across its portfolio of novel drug targets to create and advance drug candidates for neurological and oncology indications as a part of a strategic agreement with Charles River entered last November.

A similar pact with Pioneering Medicines, a strategic initiative of Cambridge, MA-headquartered Flagship Pioneering, earlier in the year gives access to Charles River’s Logica platform to be utilized across a portfolio of targets for creating optimized small molecules, is yet another instance for the trend.

Rise of the TechBio CROs

Computational tools with the ever-improving performance of predictive modeling are now helping to more rapidly identify high-quality chemical matter in early-stage drug discovery which is otherwise a long, iterative process requiring significant resources and expertise. 

AI has the potential to offer more than $70 billion in savings for the drug discovery process by 2028 and to save up to 70% time and costs for drug discovery in pharmaceutical companies, according to an AI in drug discovery market size analysis report by Bekryl, a NY-based market research firm.

And many enterprises with a focus on data-driven drug discovery believe that the emergence of radical technological innovations has created the opportunity to envision new approaches to discovering therapeutics more efficiently and at scale.

This “growing wave” of technology-first drug discovery companies, say domain experts, offer specialized contract services making AI and machine learning the cornerstone of their research process. By putting these disruptive tech platforms for applications ranging from concept generation, target discovery, biology analytics, and cell image recognition, these companies command an end-to-end drug discovery system.

Recursion, a leading clinical stage techbio company, is an example. Headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT, the company signed deals in May to acquire two firms in the AI-enabled drug discovery space: Cyclica and Valence.

Toronto-based Cyclica’s AI-enabled deep learning engine predicts the polypharmacology of small molecules. While Valence has pioneered the application of low-data learning in drug design. Based in Montréal at Mila, Valence is the world’s largest deep-learning research institute.

Operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Recursion says it is integrating technology, biology, and chemistry to modernize drug discovery and development.

Currently, Recursion partners with Bayer for a select set of precision oncology programs and Roche/Genentech in key areas of neuroscience and an oncology indication.

Exscientia, BenevolentAI, and Insilico Medicine are among other technology-first companies that use AI to precision engineer future drugs and perhaps, revolutionize drug discovery.

Obviously, there is a great deal of exuberance around AI today. Industry leaders, however, maintain that despite all the hope and hype, many of the AI claims still remain unsubstantiated in the drug discovery process.

Novel models in partnering

Obesity treatments and their surging demand look spurring more research activity in this area.

In what can be termed a unique initiative to accelerate the translation of academic ideas to therapeutic product candidates in the cardiometabolic space, Novo Nordisk joined hands with Evotec to launch LAB eN² in September. The unique engagement model combines Evotec’s multimodality drug discovery and pre-clinical development capabilities with the Ozempic/Wegovy-maker’s therapeutic, clinical, and commercial expertise. LAB eN² has already signed on four academic institutions to participate: Harvard University, Mass General Brigham, Yale University, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, according to the company release.

Evotec SE, earlier in the year, expanded its integrated multi-target drug discovery agreement with data-driven biotech creation firm, Related Sciences (RS) to include Evotec’s leading-edge capabilities in covalent inhibitor discovery, to discover a new class of highly potent and selective covalent medicines for eligible targets. Launched in early 2021, the Evotec-RS partnership aims to build upon the firms’ custom covalent libraries and novel screening approaches.

Again, in March, Evotec announced an extension of its strategic partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) to identify, validate and develop novel targets for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases—another area of intense activity in drug discovery. The program leverages the Hamburg-headquartered CDMO’s modality-agnostic precision medicine platforms. Originally signed in 2016, a first program, EVT8683, was in-licensed by BMS in September 2021.

BMS runs a long-standing drug discovery collaboration with India–based Syngene, as well. In early 2023, the CDMO celebrated its 25th year of research partnering with the NY-headquartered drug major. Syngene’s dedicated research facility for BMS at Bangalore has produced 10 drug candidates for further studies and one among them is currently in clinical trials, according to the company website.

Small molecules, targeted therapies

Owing to their advantages in a wide range of targets, small molecule inhibitors continue to be one of the primary targeted therapies for cancer.

With the goal of furthering research to identify candidates with activity towards a tumor suppressor protein, MSD expanded its collaboration with Astex, a UK-based firm dedicated to the discovery and development of novel small molecule therapeutics for oncology and diseases of the central nervous system, in August.

Other major deals in the segment include the San Francisco headquartered Belharra Therapeutics’ collaboration with Genentech of Roche to discover and develop small molecule medicines in areas including oncology, immuno-oncology, autoimmune, and neurodegenerative diseases. The deal, signed last January, gives Genentech access to Belharra’s innovative platform that builds on a legacy of chemoproteomics drug discovery to identify functional and actionable small molecule ligands for protein targets. The platform uses a unique approach to capture the interaction of tagged compounds with the human proteome.

In August, HitGen reached a service pact with Nested Therapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology company specializing in precision oncology medicines to identify hits against targets of interest. According to the Chinese CRO, the company’s DNA-encoded library (DEL) technology platform includes over 1.2 trillion small molecules.

For discovering specific peptide receptor radionuclide therapies against cancer cells, Orano Med SAS, a biotechnology company developing Lead-212 (212Pb), a targeted alpha therapy, has collaborated with Orbit Discovery Ltd. Under the terms agreed in September 2023, the Oxford, UK-headquartered Orbit will deploy its bead-based peptide display engine to discover peptide leads specific to targets related to specific tumors.

The hotly pursued RNA-targeted therapeutics segment saw Daiichi Sankyo inking a deal with France-based Depixus, a life science technology company specializing in magnetic force spectroscopy-based technology, to use its MAGNA technology to accelerate an RNA-targeted drug discovery program in December.

Advancing analytical tools

The foregone year witnessed some major investments and launches in the drug discovery tools and analytical service systems space.

Making a big stride in advanced proteomics drug discovery, Thermo Fisher announced the acquisition of Olink Holding AB, a leading provider of next-generation proteomics solutions. The Swedish firm’s proprietary technology, which provides high throughput protein analysis at any scale, comes with a library of more than 5,300 validated protein biomarker targets.

Thermo Fisher, which introduced a new line of low-flow HPLC columns that improve separation performance and stability of biologically complex samples in March also unveiled Astral mass spectrometer (MS). The Astral analyzer combines fast throughput, high sensitivity, and deep proteome coverage to allow researchers to uncover proteins that previously evaded detection.

Piramal Pharma Solutions, another Indian CDMO, launched a high-throughput screening (HTS) facility in October that augments the existing in-vitro biology capabilities at its drug discovery services site in Ahmedabad, India. This new expansion significantly adds primary and secondary screening capabilities to the end-to-end solutions CDMO and couples new biology services with existing chemistry capabilities.

Charles River also bolstered its HTS capabilities by acquiring SAMDI Tech, a leading provider of label-free HTS solutions for drug discovery research, in January. The Chicago-based SAMDI Tech offers a proprietary MS technology for identifying binding interactions. It minimizes false positive results, reduces reagent requirements, and offers multiplexing capabilities without restricting assay conditions to accelerate the timeline. 

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Soman Harachand is a pharmaceutical journalist based in Mumbai and a regular contributor to Contract Pharma. He can be reached at harachand@gmail.com.