AllianThera Biopharma comes out of stealth and collaborates on AI with Insilico Medicine

Thursday, 25th of March 2021 (5:00AM EST) — Today, AllianThera Biopharma (ATB), a Suzhou, China-based startup focusing on inventing and developing innovative medicines for a broad range of diseases, and Insilico Medicine, a global leader in deep learning for drug discovery and development, announced a collaboration to discover and develop molecules for novel targets in cancer and autoimmune diseases.

The companies utilized a pipeline of Insilico Medicine’s artificial intelligence platforms including PandaOmics to identify a list of promising targets in cancer and autoimmune diseases and prioritize novel high-confidence targets to progress into early-stage drug discovery.

ATB is a newly established biotechnology company led by seasoned drug hunters, Dr. Yuan-Hua Ding (CEO) and Dr. Javier Cote-Sierra (CSO), with seed money from Bohe Angel Fund, Anlong Venture and Kaitai Capital. Dr. Ding and Dr. Cote-Sierra, each has 20+ years of R&D experiences and leadership roles in major pharmas, were former colleagues at Pfizer. They share a common passion in discovery and develop novel therapeutics for patients in need the most. In the recent past, Dr. Ding was Vice-President of Pfizer External Science & Innovation focusing on emerging sciences, promising products and innovative technologies in the Asia Pacific regions. In this role, Dr. Ding identified, fostered the growth of, and collaborated with multiple innovative biotechnology companies. Dr. Cote-Sierra, an immunologist with strong drug discovery and early clinical development expertise acquired through his years at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (Takeda now), Roche and GSK, was recently the Head of Inflammation and Immunology External Innovation at Sanofi Partnering where he and his team contributed to multi-program collaborations and acquisitions.

Dr. Ding and Dr. Cote-Sierra together with Prof. Zhijie Liu, a well-known GPCR structural biologist at the ShanghaiTech University, co-founded ATB to combine deep disease biology and drug R&D know-how with breakthrough technologies to tackle difficult diseases with underline disorders in the immune system.

“Most of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies these days are working more or less on similar well-known targets and the innovation is in new molecular structures. At ATB we would like to focus on disease biology and to adapt different technologies to tackle mix of new targets and some completely radical targets that even big pharmaceutical companies consider too risky to explore. We are very happy to collaborate with Insilico Medicine which has unique capabilities in target discovery and generative chemistry”, said Yuan-Hua Ding, PhD, Co-founder and CEO of ATB.

“Dr. Ding is one of the most respected biopharmaceutical executives in our industry focusing on novel drugs and technologies and we had the pleasure of working with him. We are very happy that he decided to form a company focused on leading-edge technologies with transformative potential, assembled a great team of seasoned drug hunters and chose to collaborate with us, on both target discovery and generative chemistry”, said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine.

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About ATB (AllianThera Biopharma):

Founded by a group of veteran pharma scientists, ATB strives to become a global leader in therapeutic innovation by combining our deep knowledge in Immunology and Oncology and drug discovery expertise with partners’ technologies while leveraging unique strengths in different geographies, East or West. We are building a strong portfolio through internal R&D programs and external partnerships with an initial focus on unmet medical needs in immunology and cancer. ATB is funded by Anlong Venture, Bohe Angel Fund and Katai Capital.

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 100 peer-reviewed papers, applied for over 25 patents, and received multiple industry awards. Website http://insilico.com/