Despite the title of the Sunday, June 4 lead-off presentation at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago, there was little room left for doubt about the increasingly important place of artificial intelligence (AI) in drug development. The program, Artificial Intelligence for Drug Development: Fad or Future, ultimately pointed to a positive future, with the only faddish part being discarded approaches that no longer work.

Xtalpi Inc. has entered into an artificial intelligence (AI) drug discovery collaboration with Eli Lilly & Co. The collaboration, valued at up to $250 million in upfront and milestone payments, will leverage Xtalpi’s integrated AI capabilities and robotics platform to de novo design and deliver drug candidates for an undisclosed target. Xtalpi seeks to deliver a novel compound, which Lilly will pursue in clinical and commercial development.

Evaxion Biotech A/S has unveiled the technology behind its proprietary genetic adjuvant developed to enhance the effectiveness of DNA and mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases and cancer.

The most ambitious objective of any treatment is to eradicate the disease, acting on its origin to cure it instead of treating its symptoms. This is the purpose of the gene therapy against type 2 diabetes (T2D) and obesity that Fractyl Health Inc. is developing. Scientists from the Lexington, Mass.-based company have designed a strategy based on glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) to transform pancreatic cells and reverse the disease.

Absci Corp. and the University of Oxford’s...

Salipro Biotech AB and Dynabind GmbH have achieved a key milestone under their...

Scisparc Ltd.’s drug discovery joint venture, Mitocarex Bio, has successfully developed its core algorithm for allowing the generation of reliable...

One way to prevent the effect of a molecule is to use the cell’s own machinery to break it down. This is what the PROTAC technology does, an acronym for proteolysis targeting chimera, or BacPROTAC, when applied to bacteria. A study led by Austrian and German scientists has demonstrated the effectiveness of this technique in eliminating the tuberculosis pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). The finding opens the door to the BacPROTAC strategy as an alternative to the development of drugs against this microorganism.

Integrated Biosciences Inc., an early-stage startup that is combining synthetic biology and machine learning in the hunt for drugs that tackle cell senescence, has demonstrated its capabilities in a newly published study in Nature Aging on May 4, 2023, which employed artificial intelligence to identify three novel compounds that are highly selective for Bcl-2 and that exhibit favorable medicinal chemistry profiles.