AI in drug development news round-up
Recent developments in the biopharma AI world include an alliance between Thermo and Datavant, plus news from Insilico, Evinova, BPGbio, Evogene, and AMPLY.
Real-world data interoperability
Thermo Fisher Scientific's PPD clinical research business has partnered with Datavant on a project to enhance the connection between real-world data (RWD) and clinical research. The initiative focuses on secure data linkage – with an emphasis on preserving patient privacy – and ensuring it is interoperable, as well as enhancing analytics to support more efficient study design and faster evidence generation across the research lifecycle.
The alliance will combine PPD's clinical trials and patient registry platforms with Datavant's tokenisation technology, which de-identifies patient data and allows electronic health record information to be incorporated securely into studies. The two companies said that this will allow biopharma customers "to design more connected studies, improve recruitment, and accelerate evidence generation."
AI applied to small-molecule discovery
Computational chemistry company Evogene has expanded an alliance with Google Cloud, first set up in 2024, that is focusing on the integration of AI agents into its platform for small-molecule discovery and optimisation. The goal is to increase the "speed, precision, and efficiency" of small-molecule discovery for human health and agrochemical applications.
This marks the second phase of the partnership, which has already come up with a generative AI (GenAI) model that underpins Evogene's ChemPass AI platform, which the company credits with driving its recent research collaborations, which include deals in the last few months with Systasy Bioscience, Shanghai Lishan Bio, and Unravel Biosciences.
New alliance on CNS, autoimmune diseases
Insilico Medicine has teamed up with China Medical System on a series of AI-powered drug discovery collaborations across two or more projects in the fields of central nervous system and autoimmune diseases.
The partnership brings together Insilico's AI platform – which has generated a lead candidate rentosertib (formerly known as ISM001-055) in a phase 2a study in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) – with CMS' expertise in the CNS and autoimmune disease categories, said the two companies in a statement. Insilico said it stands to receive R&D funding support of up to "several tens of millions" of Hong Kong dollars for each programme.
BMS adopts Evinova AI module
Bristol Myers Squibb has tapped into Evinova's AI-enabled clinical development platform, saying it will deploy it across its global portfolio "to improve trial design, accelerate timelines, and enhance cost efficiency." Specifically, the big pharma will use an Evinova module designed to boost productivity and reduce costs, as well as to improve the clinical research experience for investigation sites and patients.
Evinova was formed by AstraZeneca in 2023 and operates as a separate healthtech business, fuelled by strategic alliances with contract research organisations Parexel and Fortrea. Last November, Harbour BioMed also signed a wide-ranging alliance with the company for its work on the development of antibody therapeutics in immunology and oncology.
Liverpool AI partnership
Biopharma company BPGbio has joined forces with Liverpool University in the UK on a project to use large-scale healthcare data and advanced AI techniques – applied to medical imaging, laboratory results, genetic and protein analysis, and patient outcomes – to speed up the development of new drug targets and treatments.
An interdisciplinary research team at Liverpool will help BPGbio improve the speed, scalability, and real-world application of the company's NAi platform, "increasing its impact across drug discovery pipelines and clinical research," according to a report by the National Health Executive.
AMPLY financial backing
AI-driven drug discovery company AMPLY Discovery, a spinout from Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, has attracted an investment from South Korea's Keeps Biopharma that will be used to develop its platform, which applies AI and computational mining to multi-omic datasets – including non-coding genomic regions – to discover disease-relevant signals from digital biological data.
The two companies will also collaborate on various projects in oncology, according to an update. Meanwhile, the UK start-up has also announced the appointment of Dr Oliver Rausch, formerly of Storm Therapeutics, as its chief scientific officer.
