Insilico Medicine and Arctoris Forge AI-Powered Partnership to Accelerate Discovery of Novel COVID-19 Therapies

36Kr Exclusive: AI Company InSilico Medicine and Drug Discovery Platform Arctoris Announce Technical Partnership, Combining Robotics and AI to Discover, Synthesize, and Analyze a Series of New Therapies for COVID-19

InSilico Medicine is a biotechnology company that leverages artificial intelligence to develop an end-to-end drug discovery pipeline, while Arctoris, a spin-off from the University of Oxford, operates the world’s first fully automated drug discovery platform.

To put it vividly, the partnership between the two companies can be understood as leveraging “AI + robotics” for drug development. On one hand, they will combine their respective strengths in AI-driven drug discovery for target identification and generative chemistry; on the other hand, they will integrate robotic technologies to rapidly generate high-quality cellular, molecular, and biochemical data.

This collaborative partnership facilitates the accelerated discovery and validation of novel molecules. InSilico Medicine leverages its artificial intelligence technology to identify new small molecules, while Arctoris rapidly evaluates their predicted biological activity on its robotic platform. Operating within a “design-test-refine” loop, the partners iterate through new molecules several times faster than the industry standard, thereby accelerating progress toward successful new drug development.

In terms of revenue model, the R&D platform offers remote access to pre-optimized and thoroughly validated research and development workflows for global partners and clients.

In terms of R&D progress, InSilico Medicine and Arctoris have already collaborated on BioTarget, a joint project supported by the UK’s Institute of Cancer Research, aimed at discovering new molecules for cancer treatment.Crowdsourcing the drug discovery process and enabling global researchers to utilize advanced experimental tools, thereby making drug discovery more open and collaborative. Further collaboration will focus on joint drug discovery projects in oncology, with the aim of eliminating age-related diseases and promoting healthy longevity.

In the realm of COVID-19 drug development, the two companies jointly discovered, synthesized, and analyzed a series of novel therapeutics for COVID-19. Among these, the JAK inhibitor research outlined a group of potent inhibitors that can help patients by modulating the life-threatening cytokine storm induced by COVID-19.

It is worth mentioning that,Last month, InSilico Medicine published another new research paper titled “A Human Gut Microbiome Aging Clock Based on Taxonomic Analysis and Deep Learning” in iScience. This study was conducted in collaboration between the Computational Cardiovascular Science Group at the University of Oxford and InSilico Medicine. The research utilized thousands of whole-genome sequencing samples of gut bacteria to develop and validate a novel deep microbiome aging clock. This new tool demonstrates that host age is a significant contributor to gut community dynamics.