Insilico and Astellas collaborate on AI for a conventionally challenging target family

Tuesday, 28th of April, 2020 (9:00AM, Japan) – Insilico Medicine has announced that it has entered into a research collaboration agreement with Astellas Pharma Inc. to utilize Insilico Medicine’s novel generative artificial intelligence technology aimed at accelerating development of candidates against a conventionally challenging target family. This collaboration builds on AI platform developed by Insilico Medicine and will apply Astellas’ expertise in drug discovery.

“Astellas is at the forefront of innovation in drug discovery and is seen as a leader in developing and acquiring new emerging technology. This collaboration will exploit the capabilities of our entire generative chemistry platform which experienced exponential increases in performance and quality over the past few years. We are very happy to collaborate with some of the most intelligent and sophisticated scientists in the world on a very interesting target which, has no known examples to learn from, and our platform utilizing meta learning, zero-shot generative reinforcement learning, and genetic algorithms, holds a lot of promise,” Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder, and CEO of Insilico Medicine.

Under the terms of the agreement, Insilico Medicine will receive an upfront payment and milestones. Insilico Medicine will closely collaborate with Astellas, which will synthesize, optimize and characterize the molecules generated using artificial intelligence.

“We are excited to collaborate with Astellas’ experienced drug discovery team in applying our state-of-the-art AI technologies in molecular generation for this high-value previously challenging target family. Insilico Medicine is a world leader in artificial intelligence for drug discovery and the original inventor of the many approaches. We believe that this collaboration with one of the most innovative pharmaceutical companies will help deliver the much needed drugs to the patients sooner,” said Jimmy Yen-Chu Lin, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine Taiwan.

Earlier this year, Insilico Medicine’s generative chemistry technology was highlighted by the MIT Technology Review as a breakthrough of 2020, and is actively used to generate novel chemistry for the key SARS-CoV-2 proteins.

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http://www.astellas.com/en

Since 2014 Insilico Medicine is focusing on generative models, reinforcement learning (RL), and other modern machine learning techniques for the generation of new molecular structures with the specified parameters, generation of synthetic biological data, target identification, and prediction of clinical trials outcomes. Recently, Insilico Medicine secured $37 million in series B funding. Since its inception, Insilico Medicine raised over $52 million, published over 80 peer-reviewed papers, applied for over 25 patents, and received multiple industry awards.
Website http://insilico.com/

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