Andy Stamford, PhD, Vice President of Chemistry at Deerfield Discovery and Development at Deerfield Management, says he didn’t fully appreciate the advantages of using artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate and improve drug discovery until he saw a 2019 Nature Biotechnology report in which Insilico Medicine’s AI tool was used to discover a potent inhibitor of fibrosis in just 21 days and produced a promising lead candidate.
Credit: Kerry Long
Andy Stamford, PhD, Vice President of Chemistry at Deerfield Discovery and Development at Deerfield Management, says he didn’t fully appreciate the advantages of using artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate and improve drug discovery until he saw a 2019 Nature Biotechnology report in which Insilico Medicine’s AI tool was used to discover a potent inhibitor of fibrosis in just 21 days and produced a promising lead candidate.
“It was clear there was something real here,” said Stamford.
In June 2021, Deerfield Management was one of the investors backing Insilico’s $225 million Series C Round and soon after Insilico had established a New York City presence at the Cure building on Park Avenue South — a state-of-the-art 12-story innovation campus developed by Deerfield.
In December 2021, Deerfield Management’s Deerfield Discovery and Development team partnered with Insilico Medicine, a clinical stage end-to-end AI-driven drug discovery company, to get full access to all of Insilico’s AI platforms for their own programs and for their incubator companies.
There are currently three projects in the works, says Petrina Kamya, PhD, Head of AI Platforms at Insilico who is leading the partnership. “We’re working very closely with Deerfield to develop new therapeutics,” Kamya says. “It’s very collaborative.”
Stamford was impressed by the ability of AI to design novel, medicinally attractive molecules to potential therapeutic targets after putting Insilico’s target discovery platform, Chemistry42, to the test.
“We are extremely impressed by the expert team of scientists at Insilico and the sophistication of the technology and chemistry,” said Stamford. “We believe the platform has the potential to broadly impact drug discovery and break ground on novel targets across multiple disease indications.”
Insilico has partnered with a number of major pharmaceutical companies to advance their therapeutic programs, including Pfizer, Astellas, Johnson & Johnson and Taisho. Since the launch of Insilico’s Chemistry42 drug design platform in September 2020, 9 out of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies have deployed Insilico’s software, including Merck KGaA and UCB.
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine, a clinical stage end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, is connecting biology, chemistry, and clinical trials analysis using next-generation AI systems. The company has developed AI platforms that utilize deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers, and other modern machine learning techniques to discover novel targets and to design novel molecular structures with desired properties. Insilico Medicine is delivering breakthrough solutions to discover and develop innovative drugs for cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system (CNS) diseases and aging-related diseases.
For more information, visit www.insilico.com
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