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Credit: Insilico Medicine
Wednesday, July 5, 2017, Baltimore, Md. -Can big data and financial engineering cure Cancer, Alzheimer's, and other age-related illnesses? ActuRx and Insillico Medicine think so. Both companies have developed complementary techniques to filter potential solutions against aging illnesses and now they think they can convert financial masses into health improvements worldwide.
ActuRx is a French actuarial science company with a dual origin. The founders built their career in Banks and Insurance while keeping a strong focus on pharmaceutical market access, epidemiology and biomedical research. In the later years, they invested all their energy in detecting health solution patterns from worldwide pharmaceutical data. Their predictions also come from the analysis of social networks, patient discussion forums, newsgroups and other real world data sources. Today, ActuRx is turning back to finance, integrating its predictions in an investment framework that will finances the development of numerous health solutions.
"While Insilico Medicine is modelling the clinical and metabolic characteristics of patients, we consider the human body as a mysterious black box. The billions of living humans are as many black boxes, performing various experiments that are recorded from various angles! Some data are aggregated, some data are longitudinal, some factors are missing here and there. We spent a lot of time branching the various data to model the behaviors of the human body with respect to drugs. But it is worth it! With Insilico Medicine looking at the inside of the body and ActuRx looking at the outside, we have a very complementary approach to drug discovery."
In the scope of this collaboration, Insilico Medicine will use its artificial intelligence tools to make predictions for alternative uses of existing FDA-approved drugs, as well as other types of treatments such as new drugs, or possibly even gene therapies or thymus regeneration: a wide range of possibilities exist to solve multiple chronic and aging conditions. Insillico Medicine predictions are based on deep learned structural chemistry, transcriptional response engines and generative adversarial networks (GNAs).
"We approach drug discovery as a software development process. But in software development, if there is a bug, one can go back and fix it, in the pharmaceutical industry most of the projects do not go back to the drawing board after failing, so you need to have the perfect drug before going into the clinical trials. Unfortunately, many pharmaceutical companies do not spend enough time debugging their drugs and through our collaboration with ActuRx we will be able to develop a pipeline to discover the right drugs for the right diseases and personalize for the individual patients", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.
The combined predictions of ActuRx and Insillico Medicine will select the most promising drug developments, whether they are suggested by ActuRx, Insilico Medicine or any other source. An adapted financial structure will be set up (a "longevity megafund") to invest in the corresponding clinical trials. We hope this is the beginning of a new area in medicine.
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About ActuRx
ActuRx is located in France and performs studies for health payers including pharmaceutical and insurance companies. As the founders' financial backgrounds are enhanced with a true passion for biogerontology, epidemiology, pharmaceutical and data science, ActuRx was created to bridge the rift between drug research and development and market reality through drug repurposing. While many actors rely on small or medium-data epidemiology, biochemical, animal and 'omics' studies, ActuRx developed a set of methods to work on 'big data' that assume the body as a 'black box' and that mostly address aging and chronic conditions.
About Insilico Medicine, Inc
Insilico Medicine, Inc. is an artificial intelligence and bioinformatics company located at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore with R&D resources in Belgium, Russia, and the UK hiring talent through hackathons and competitions. It utilizes advances in genomics, big data analysis and deep learning for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company pursues internal drug discovery programs in cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS, diabetes, sarcopenia and geroprotector discovery. Through its Pharma.AI division, the company provides advanced machine learning services to biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and skin care companies. Brief company video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8