Artificial intelligence (AI) drug design company Valence Discovery has entered into a drug discovery partnership with Repare Therapeutics, a collaboration driven toward the purpose of discovering and optimizing precision oncology treatment candidates.
In recent years, AI-fueled drug discovery programs have risen dramatically, particularly in regard to rare diseases.
Earlier this month, clinical-stage pharmatech company Exscientia that focuses on AI for drug design completed a $100 million Series C financing round to expand its AI-driven drug development goals. Other more prominent players that currently use AI for drug discovery include Google, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, Tute Genomics and MetaMind.
According to a statement on the collaboration, the partnership between the two companies will help “to rapidly optimize drug candidates against multiple potency, selectivity, safety, and pharmacology criteria.” The AI-enabled drug design platform from Valence capitalizes on research performed by the founding team at Mila, a large deep-learning research institute based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Valence applies few-shot learning in the design of new drugs, which the company says allows it to “unlock prediction tasks for which only small amounts of training data are available.” This encompasses novel targets as well as complex ADME criteria.
Active learning and iterative optimization strategies are also utilized by the Valence platform to ensure information-rich compounds are identified and selected for synthesis, thus “enabling the design of compounds meeting the target potency, selectivity, and ADME criteria in fewer iterations, and with far less data” than previously possible without the platform.
“We broadly sought out a machine learning partner for our proprietary drug discovery and ultimately found the ideal fit in our own backyard,” said Cameron Black, Ph.D., Repare Therapeutics’ Executive Vice President of Discovery. “The depth and breadth of the machine learning talent here in Montreal is exceptional, and we are pleased to be initiating this project with the drug design experts at Valence Discovery.”
“As a world-leader in precision oncology, Repare’s team and technologies have the potential to unlock the next generation of precision oncology medicines for patients,” added Valence’s CEO Daniel Cohen. “We look forward to bringing our expertise in AI-enabled drug design to bear on such important challenges in drug discovery.”
In addition to the growing interest in AI drug discovery, precision oncology initiatives and partnerships have also been on the rise in recent years. In early March of this year, Caris Life Sciences announced it had expanded its Precision Oncology Alliance™ with the addition of Singapore’s Curie Oncology. The alliance brings together a network of leading cancer centers to advance cancer profiling and establish standard of care for oncology-related molecular testing. Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health also joined Caris’ Precision Oncology Alliance in early March to further advance comprehensive cancer profiling in patients with cancer.
And in December 2020, Bayer entered into a collaboration agreement with Veracyte to advance a Precision Oncology Patient Identification Program in the realm of thyroid cancer. The program sees Bayer offering testing with Veracyte’s Afirma Xpression Atlas with the goal of identifying underlying genomic drivers in thyroid tumors.
A precision oncology agreement between ORIC Pharmaceuticals and Mirati Therapeutics in August of last year saw ORIC paying $20 million in shares to Mirati in exchange for exclusive worldwide license to develop and commercialize a Mirati’s precision oncology PRC2 inhibitor program in prostate cancer.