Rewriting Drug Discovery with an AI-Multi-Omics Approach
The genomics revolution promised to unravel diseases and lead to treatments that addressed their root causes. In reality, says Mo Jain, your zip code remains a better predictor for how healthy you will be over the course of your life than your genetic code does. That’s because, except for monogenic diseases, etiology tends to be far more complex than the identification of a single gene. Sapient Bio company is using its AI-driven, multi-omics platform to advance the discovery and development of precision medicines. We spoke to Jain, chief scientific officer of Sapient, about how its technology bridges the gap from discovery to clinical development, accelerates drug development timelines, and expands opportunities to drug previously undruggable targets.
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Overcoming Chemoresistance and Activating the Immune System in Difficult-to-Treat Cancers
The enzyme GSK3β, in healthy cells, is involved in glucose metabolism. In cancer cells, though, it serves as a master regulator of tumor growth, progression, and cell survival. While GSK3β has long been an attractive target in cancer therapy, it has been difficult to inhibit due to the poor pharmaceutical characteristics and adverse effects of therapeutic candidates. Actuate Therapeutics’ experimental therapy elraglusib has shown early promise. Results suggest it not only suppresses tumor growth but also activates the immune system to combat cancer. We spoke to Dan Schmitt, president and CEO of Actuate Therapeutics, about elraglusib’s potential to overcome chemoresistance, its recent clinical successes in metastatic pancreatic cancer, and the drug’s unique multimodal mechanism.
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A Hub-and-Spoke Ophthalmology Company with an Eye for Innovation
Hub-and-spoke business models—the use of a central core of business functions with pipeline assets spun out into subsidiary companies—have gained traction for the benefits they can provide in terms of capital efficiency, diversification of risks, and improved access to capital. Eyexora is applying that business model to accelerate the development of therapies for ophthalmic indications. We spoke to Theresa Heah, CEO of Eyexora, about why the hub-and-spoke model is well-suited for the development of ophthalmic therapies, its initial assets in-licensed from the Singapore Eye Research Institute, and how it identifies early-stage candidates with high potential.
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An AI Collaborative that Welcomes All into the Fold
OpenFold, an open-source, collaborative initiative founded in 2022 to address the challenges of protein structure prediction and design using artificial intelligence, emerged as a response to the restricted commercial access to DeepMind’s AlphaFold platform. Leveraging public datasets and using a pre-competitive consortium model, OpenFold seeks to democratize cutting-edge protein engineering tools for both industry and academia. We spoke to Brian Weitzner, director of computational and structural biology at Outpace Bio and co-founder of OpenFold, about the creation of the collaborative effort, how its open licensing model ensures broad accessibility, and how it stacks up against AlphaFold.
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Hitting the Reset Button on Cellular Aging
Transcription factors control the genetic programs that maintain cellular balance, but while they have been seen as compelling targets for aging-related disease, they have long been considered “undruggable.” Junevity’s RESET platform leverages large-scale human omics data and AI models to pinpoint key transcriptional drivers of disease and to design siRNA therapies that restore healthy gene expression. We spoke to John Hoekman, co-founder and CEO of Junevity, about the role of transcription factors in healthy biology and aging-related disease, the company’s AI-driven platform for identifying dysregulated transcription factors, and its lead programs targeting type 2 diabetes and obesity.
The Bio Report podcast, hosted by award-winning journalist Daniel Levine, focuses on the intersection of biotechnology with business, science, and policy.
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