This collaboration will capitalise on Absci’s Integrated Drug Creation platform—seamlessly integrating with AstraZeneca’s expertise in oncology, aiming to expedite the discovery of a potentially game-changing cancer therapy.

Under the agreement, Absci will deploy its pioneering generative AI technology to craft a therapeutic candidate antibody tailored for a specific oncology target. The collaboration encompasses an upfront commitment, substantial R&D funding, milestone payments, and royalties on future product sales.

Sean McClain, Founder & CEO of Absci, said: “AstraZeneca is a leader in developing novel treatments in oncology, and we are excited to collaborate with them to design a therapeutic candidate antibody with the potential to improve the lives of cancer patients.”

Absci’s Integrated Drug Creation platform combines generative AI and scalable wet-lab technologies, generating proprietary data by scrutinising millions of protein-protein interactions. This data fuels Absci’s proprietary AI models, facilitating the design of antibodies that are later validated through wet-lab experiments.

This accelerated approach, completing the entire cycle within approximately six weeks, enhances the probability of successful development outcomes for biologic drug candidates.

Puja Sapra, PhD, SVP of Biologics Engineering & Oncology Targeted Delivery at AstraZeneca, commented: “This collaboration is an exciting opportunity to utilise Absci’s de novo AI antibody creation platform to design a potential new antibody therapy in oncology.”

The announcement follows Absci’s recent publication on the design and validation of de novo antibodies using their state-of-the-art ‘zero-shot’ generative AI model.

The collaboration between Absci and AstraZeneca should further help to demonstrate how AI can be used to revolutionise drug discovery.

(Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash)

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The UK’s most powerful supercomputer and among the world’s top fifty, Cambridge-1 was announced by the technology company in October last year and cost $100 million (£72m) to build.

Its first projects with AstraZeneca, GSK, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College London, and Oxford Nanopore Technologies include developing a deeper understanding of brain diseases like dementia, using AI to design new drugs, and improving the accuracy of finding disease-causing variations in human genomes.

“Cambridge-1 will empower world-leading researchers in business and academia with the ability to perform their life’s work on the U.K.’s most powerful supercomputer, unlocking clues to disease and treatments at a scale and speed previously impossible in the U.K.,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.

“The discoveries developed on Cambridge-1 will take shape in the U.K., but the impact will be global, driving groundbreaking research that has the potential to benefit millions around the world,” he added.

AI for healthcare is growing rapidly in the UK, with a range of start-ups and larger pharmaceutical companies turning to mining the vast quantities of data available to discover potential drugs, further understand certain diseases, and improve and personalise patient care.

“It’s great to see it in the UK ecosystem,” said Roel Bulthuis, head of the healthcare team at Inkef Capital. “Many European healthcare systems are not as advanced in their thinking about using data and integrating that into the healthcare system.”

According to Frontier Economics, an economics consulting firm, Cambridge-1 has the potential to create an estimated value of £600 million over the next 10 years.

Find out more about Digital Transformation Week North America, taking place on November 9-10 2021, a virtual event and conference exploring advanced DTX strategies for a ‘digital everything’ world.

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AI is helping with COVID-19 research around the world and much of it is being powered by NVIDIA GPUs. It’s a daunting task, new drugs often cost over $2.5 billion in research and development — doubling every nine years — and 90 percent of efforts fail.

Nvidia wants to help speed up discoveries of vital medicines while reducing costs

“COVID-19 hits home this urgency [for new tools],” Huang says.

Huang announced NVIDIA Clara Discovery—a suite of tools for assisting scientists in discovering lifesaving new drugs.

NVIDIA Clara combines imaging, radiology, and genomics to help develop healthcare AI applications. Pre-trained AI models and application-specific frameworks help researchers to find targets, build compounds, and develop responses.

Dr Hal Barron, Chief Scientific Officer and President of R&D at GSK, commented:

“AI and machine learning are like a new microscope that will help scientists to see things that they couldn’t see otherwise.

NVIDIA’s investment in computing, combined with the power of deep learning, will enable solutions to some of the life sciences industry’s greatest challenges and help us continue to deliver transformational medicines and vaccines to patients.

Together with GSK’s new AI lab in London, I am delighted that these advanced technologies will now be available to help the UK’s outstanding scientists.”

Researchers can now use biomedical-specific language models for their work, thanks to a breakthrough in natural language processing. This means researchers can organise and activate large datasets, research literature, and sort through papers or patents on existing treatments and other vital real-world data.

“Where there are popular industry tools, our computer scientists accelerate them,” Huang said. “Where no tools exist, we develop them—like NVIDIA Parabricks, Clara Imaging, BioMegatron, BioBERT, NVIDIA RAPIDS.”

We’re all hoping COVID-19 research – using such powerful new tools available to scientists – can lead to a vaccine within a year or two, when they have often taken a decade or longer to create.

“The use of big data, supercomputing, and artificial intelligence has the potential to transform research and development; from target identification through clinical research and all the way to the launch of new medicines,” commented James Weatherall, Ph.D., Head of Data Science and AI at AstraZeneca.

During his keynote, Huang provided more details about NVIDIA’s effort to build the UK’s fastest supercomputer – which will be used to further healthcare research – the Cambridge-1.

NVIDIA has established partnerships with companies leading the fight against COVID-19 and other viruses including AstraZeneca, GSK, King’s College London, the Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, and startup Oxford Nanopore. These partners can harness Cambridge-1 for their vital research.

“Tackling the world’s most pressing challenges in healthcare requires massively powerful computing resources to harness the capabilities of AI,” said Huang. “The Cambridge-1 supercomputer will serve as a hub of innovation for the UK and further the groundbreaking work being done by the nation’s researchers in critical healthcare and drug discovery.”

And, for organisations wanting to set up their own AI supercomputers, NVIDIA has announced DGX SuperPODs as the world’s first turnkey AI infrastructure. The solution was developed from years of research for NVIDIA’s own work in healthcare, automotive, healthcare, conversational AI, recommender systems, data science and computer graphics.

While Huang has a nice kitchen, I’m sure he’d like to be back on the big stage for his GTC 2021 keynote. We’d certainly all love COVID-19 to be well and truly in the rear-view mirror.

(Photo by Elwin de Witte on Unsplash)

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