[ad_1]
The world's leading pharmaceutical companies are looking to take advantage of the $ 35 billion market for an emerging disease that would affect 16 million Americans.
Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, can cause liver failure. It is caused by an accumulation of fat in the liver and is often found in people with diabetes and obesity.
Several potential treatments for the disease failed when they were tried in humans, which led some pharmaceutical companies to abandon this space. Not Gilead, California biotechnology with a market value of about 84 billion dollars. Instead of giving up his current job within NASH, the company is stepping up its efforts in the region.
Read more: The competition feeds NASH, a "silent disease" with millions of people living in a market of more than $ 35 billion. But the first results seem mixed.
Gilead unveiled Tuesday a partnership with a Silicon Valley startup called Insitro. Insitro is supported by Jeff Bezos and led by Daphne Koller, former director of computer science at Calico, spin-off of Google.
How Insitro Can Help Gilead Find New Drugs
Insitro brings together computer experts and biologists to try to enhance the speed and efficiency of traditionally tedious drug development work.
As part of its partnership with Gilead, Insitro will integrate clinical trial data from NASH for almost a decade into its system. The two companies will work together for three years, in accordance with the terms of the agreement, and could pursue up to five new target areas for drugs.
"We have been trying to solve this problem for a while," said Business Insider Mani Subramanian, Gilead Senior Vice President for Liver Disease. Gilead currently has three NASH drug candidates at an advanced stage of research and began pursuing it in 2011.
"NASH is a unique challenge, nobody has succeeded." he said. "Why not jump into an area where no one has succeeded?"
Subramanian said that Gilead had been in talks with Insitro since the launch of the company last year. Gilead has also considered partnerships with other startups, but Insitro has made a name for itself as the undisputed leader in the sector, he said.
As part of this agreement, Insitro will receive an upfront payment of $ 15 million and additional short-term payments of up to $ 35 million, based on meeting the company's objectives. In addition, Insitro will be eligible for up to $ 200 million for further milestones for each of the five targets it pursues.
The partnership will essentially consist of comparing large sets of biological data from patients with and without various forms of NASH to determine what differentiates them. Researchers will target hot spots in the data where the disease seems to be taking a different turn and will try to stop or reverse the course of the disease with a drug.
For example, "you can imagine taking skin cells in healthy people and sick people, and then use machine learning to see what distinguishes sick cells from healthy cells," Koller said. at Business Insider.
"Once you have this information, you can start looking for interventions," she said.
An "allergic reaction" to the hype of the AI
For years, the process of developing a drug is heavily relying on data from cells and mice, which often do not give concrete results for humans. As a result, it takes about a decade and about $ 2.6 billion to create each new drug.
Recently, machine learning and artificial intelligence have been touted as a potential solution, leading to the creation of dozens of new drug development companies that claim to use AI in their approach. Koller think that excitement in the region has merit.
"In general, I'm allergic to AI," Koller said. But as for the interpretation and extraction of certain types of data, honestly, it exceeded all my expectations. "
Read more: Creating a new drug takes a decade and costs a fortune. Investors paid nearly $ 1 billion to start-up companies that were trying to fix the situation.
In the field of voice recognition, for example, approaches combining machine learning and large data sets have led to developments such as Amazon's Alexa. As in the case of speech recognition, the field of drug development benefits from the ability to leverage huge data sets from places such as clinical trials.
But traditionally in the field of life sciences, these data have been separated into two areas: computer science and biology. Koller believes that their unification will allow Insitro to create the scientific databases needed to create better drugs for the first time.
Insitro was launched last year, with $ 100 million Series A funding from donors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Foresite Capital. More recently, the company has received support from the personal investment fund of Jeff Bezos, Bezos Expeditions, and Alexandria Venture Investments, Two Sigma Ventures and Verily.
"We do not just look at the same sets of data and try to reduce what's contained there," Koller said. "If you need hundreds of thousands of samples, we can generate them."
[ad_2]
Source link