Report: Insilico Medicine and Arctoris to collaborate on COVID-19 by combining robotics and AI

Thursday, 9th of July – Insilico Medicine, a biotechnology company developing an end-to-end drug discovery pipeline utilizing next-generation artificial intelligence, today announced a technology partnership with Arctoris, the world’s first fully automated drug discovery platform, offering remotely accessible, pre-optimised and fully validated R&D processes for its partners and clients globally. The partnership enables the two companies to combine their unique strengths in AI-guided drug discovery for target identification and generative chemistry on the one hand, and robotics for rapid generation of high-quality cell-based, molecular and biochemical data on the other. The partnership propels the two companies’ abilities to discover and validate novel molecules faster.

Contributing their strengths to the fight against COVID-19, the two companies utilized their unique state-of-the-art techniques to discover, synthesize, and profile a set of inhibitors for COVID-19 treatment. Insilico identified novel small molecules using its AI capabilities, with Arctoris rapidly evaluating the intended biological actions on its robotic platform. In a develop-test-refine loop, the partners iterated new molecules several times faster than the industry standard, providing unprecedented prospects for new drug discovery successes. The JAK inhibitor study profiled a set of potent inhibitors that can help patients by modulating the life-threatening cytokine storm caused by COVID-19.

“We are excited to announce our technology partnership with Insilico Medicine, a world-leader in AI-based drug discovery. We see tremendous value in combining our next-generation robotic platform with Insilico’s unique capabilities in drug design. During the COVID-19 pandemic, time is of the essence, and this project demonstrates that together, we are able to accelerate the drug discovery process, and create and progress new drug candidates faster and cheaper,” said Martin-Immanuel Bittner MD DPhil, Co-Founder & CEO of Arctoris.

“Arctoris developed an advanced robotics platform that can be used for a very broad spectrum of applications in drug discovery and biological data generation. We are very happy to partner with this Oxford-based company on our COVID-19 program. We discussed the collaboration for quite some time but this pandemic really highlighted the benefits of a close AI- and robotics- powered discovery integration,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder, and CEO of Insilico Medicine.

Insilico and Arctoris have already been working together on BioTarget, a collaborative effort supported by Cancer Research UK to find new molecules for cancer treatment from partners globally, crowdsourcing the drug discovery process and making leading experimental tools accessible to researchers worldwide, thereby democratising the drug discovery ecosystem.

Further collaboration will focus on joint drug discovery projects in oncology, a field of particular interest to both Arctoris and Insilico, with their mission to eliminate age-related disease and promote healthy longevity.

For further information, images or interviews, please contact: [email protected].

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Since 2014 Insilico Medicine is focusing on generative models, reinforcement learning (RL), and other modern machine learning techniques for the generation of new molecular structures with the specified parameters, generation of synthetic biological data, target identification, and prediction of clinical trials outcomes. Recently, Insilico Medicine secured $37 million in series B funding. Since its inception, Insilico Medicine raised over $52 million, published over 80 peer-reviewed papers, applied for over 25 patents, and received multiple industry awards. Website http://insilico.com/.

For further information, images or interviews, please contact: Sian Marshall, Head of Office, [email protected]

Arctoris Ltd is an Oxford-based research company that is revolutionising drug discovery for biotechnology companies, pharmaceutical corporations and academia. Arctoris has established the world’s first fully automated drug discovery platform, offering pre-optimised and fully validated R&D processes for its partners and customers globally. Accessible remotely, the platform provides on-demand access to a wide range of biochemical, cell biology and molecular biology assays conducted by robotics, enabling rapid, informed decision-making in basic biology, target validation, toxicology and phenotypic screening. These assay capabilities are accessed using a powerful online portal that streamlines experiment planning, ordering, tracking and data analysis. Thanks to the Arctoris platform, partners and clients can rapidly, accurately and cost-effectively perform their research and advance their drug discovery programmes.