image: Using its commercially available AI drug discovery platform, Pharma.AI, which works across biology, chemistry, and clinical medicine, Insilico has developed breakthroughs in multiple disease areas, including fibrosis, cancer, immunology and aging-related disease.
Credit: Fast Company
Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”), a clinical stage artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, has been named the top biotech company in Fast Company’s 2024 World’s Most Innovative Companies list. The prestigious list, which identifies companies driving progress around the world and involves thousands of applications, recognizes 606 organizations across 58 sectors and regions.
“This has been a significant year for Insilico Medicine, and we are honored to be recognized by Fast Company for the advances we’ve made in bringing the first generative AI drug to Phase II trials with patients, as well as using our AI platform to develop new potential treatments for cancer, IBD and other conditions with high unmet need,” says Insilico Medicine founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD.
The company recently published the story behind its lead drug, a novel treatment for the progressive and often fatal lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, in Nature Biotechnology, sharing extensive data with the scientific community.
In the past year, Insilico has had a number of significant breakthroughs, including the advancement of a new treatment for ALS designed with its platform, developing drugs for “undruggable” cancer targets in partnership with the University of Toronto, bringing a new AI-designed treatment for inflammatory bowel disease to clinical trials, nominating a potentially best-in-class preclinical candidate for ovarian and breast cancer, publishing findings on a new, potent, AI-discovered target for breast and gynecological cancer, and signing significant licensing deals on its anti-cancer assets with the Menarini Group and Exelixis.
In recognizing Insilico Medicine’s selection as 2024’s top biotech company, Fast Company writes that “In 2023, it was hard to escape the hype around AI, regardless of the industry. In biotechnology, it seemed to hit a fever pitch, with countless companies touting the technology’s transformative potential in drug discovery and design.”
They add: “While it is much too soon to evaluate the variety of approaches, or to judge their ultimate success, there are a few companies that have made real progress. Insilico Medicine is arguably the furthest along, dosing the first patient in its Phase 2 trial of a lung-disease treatment identified and designed using its generative-AI platform last summer, the first AI-designed drug to reach this stage of development.”
A pioneer in utilizing generative AI for drug discovery and development, Insilico first described the concept of using generative AI for the design of novel molecules in a peer-reviewed journal in 2016. Then, Insilico developed and validated multiple approaches and features for its generative adversarial network (GAN)-based AI platform and integrated those algorithms into the commercially available Pharma.AI platform which works across biology, chemistry, and clinical medicine. Using this platform, Insilico has developed breakthroughs in multiple disease areas, including fibrosis, cancer, immunology and aging-related disease. Since 2021, Insilico has nominated 18 preclinical candidates in its comprehensive portfolio of over 30 assets and has advanced six pipelines to the clinical stage.
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine, a global clinical stage biotechnology company powered by generative AI, 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 for novel target discovery and the generation of novel molecular structures with desired properties. Insilico Medicine is developing breakthrough solutions to discover and develop innovative drugs for cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system diseases, infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, and aging-related diseases. www.insilico.com