AI drug discovery start-up Insilico raises more than $255m
Insilico, an artificial intelligence-based drug-discovery platform preparing to trial its first treatment in humans, has raised more than $255m from investors including Warburg Pincus and Sequoia Capital China.
The Hong Kong-based start-up has 16 programmes in development, about half of which are for cancer and one of which is a potential antiviral for Covid-19. It plans to enter clinical trials this year with a novel drug for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which scars the lungs, after discovering and validating the candidate in lab experiments in under 18 months.
The fundraising will help fund the trials, making Insilico one of the first AI-based drug discovery companies to put the drugs it has discovered to the test in humans. The round includes more than 25 investors, from existing shareholders including Baidu Ventures to newcomers such as US healthcare fund OrbiMed.
Alex Zhavoronkov, chief executive, said Insilico had attracted “big shot pharmaceutical investors” with its broad programme of prospective drugs.
“They do not look at the algorithm as much as they look at the pipeline,” he added.
While some start-ups use AI either to search for a novel compound to use as a drug, or for an existing drug to repurpose, Insilico also tries to find new biological targets for treatments. It learns about fundamental biology using techniques that study gene expression and by creating synthetic patients to examine the progression of their diseases.
Insilico also licenses its software to pharmaceutical companies such as Merck and partners on projects with Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Japanese drugmaker Astellas Pharma. It also announced a collaboration with Israel’s Teva Pharmaceuticals on Tuesday to try to find new biological targets for drugs.
But Zhavoronkov said the company also wanted to run its own clinical trials, working with contractors to gather data that could be fed back into the algorithms to improve drug discovery. In pharma groups, the research teams that discover the compounds are separate from those that gather data in human trials.
Despite high hopes that AI could accelerate the slow and expensive drug discovery process, it has not delivered new treatments for Covid-19 during the pandemic.
Zhavoronkov said the delay was due to practical problems including restricted access to high-security labs, which can handle the virus, and a focus on repurposing existing molecules.
He called for more funding for drug discovery for Covid-19 and to prepare for future pandemics. The US and the UK governments have recently launched initiatives to fund antivirals, similar to their efforts last year to speed up vaccine development.
“There are many viruses that will find new ways to escape the immune system,” Zhavoronkov said. “We need to focus on drug discovery.”