Exscientia Delivers First AI-Discovered COPD Drug Candidate to GSK

According to Leiphone, Exscientia, a company headquartered in Oxford, UK, recently announced that it has delivered the first candidate drug discovered through artificial intelligence in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). This is a potential therapy for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Exscientia, founded in 2012, is a startup leveraging AI for drug discovery and development. In January this year, Exscientia announced the completion of its $26 million Series B financing round.

According to Leifeng.com, the partnership between GlaxoSmithKline and Exscientia dates back to July 2017. At that time, details of the collaboration indicated that Exscientia was tasked with developing innovative small-molecule drugs for 10 disease targets of interest to GlaxoSmithKline. If Exscientia achieved all agreed-upon milestones, it would receive a total of £33 million in funding from GlaxoSmithKline.

The company stated that the drug was developed using its AI-based Centaur Chemist automated drug discovery platform. According to previous reports from WuXi AppTec, this platform leverages both big data and machine learning methods to automatically design millions of small-molecule compounds associated with specific targets, based on existing drug development data, and screens these compounds according to efficacy, selectivity, ADME properties, and other requirements.

The top candidate compounds selected are synthesized and experimentally tested, with the resulting data fed back into the AI system to refine compound selection in subsequent rounds. This AI-driven rapid cycle of drug design, synthesis, and testing significantly enhances drug development efficiency.

Exscientia’s previous drug development collaborations with clients have shown that its AI-driven drug discovery platform identifies candidate compounds in approximately one-quarter of the time and at one-quarter of the cost required by traditional R&D methods.

“Our AI platform and methodology have made significant progress over the past few years, continuously refined and optimized through real-world projects with our pharmaceutical partners,” said Andy Bell, Chief Research Officer at Exscientia, in a statement. “With improved productivity, we believe Centaur Chemist has proven itself to be an industry-leading AI drug discovery platform, achieving historical results far superior to those of traditional discovery technologies.”

In recent years, the exploration of artificial intelligence and machine learning in drug discovery and development has garnered significant interest from pharmaceutical companies. Although still in its nascent stages, it may take some time before the integration of these two fields becomes fully mainstream.

However, many companies, both large and small, have been exploring the use of AI/ML in new drug development, particularly due to its potential to accelerate the drug discovery process and even identify novel druggable targets that traditional methods might miss. For instance, combining AI/ML with cryo-electron microscopy enables researchers to accurately infer the three-dimensional structures of molecules and map them at the atomic level in ways that conventional X-ray crystallography cannot achieve.

Leiphone(WeChat Official Account: Leiphone)It is reported that in January this year, the large contract research organization Charles River Labs and Atomwise announced a partnership to provide artificial intelligence services in the field of drug development. Last June, Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis and chip manufacturer Intel announced a partnership, with both parties using artificial intelligence to reduce the time required for microscope image analysis from 11 hours to 31 minutes.

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