LONDON – U.S. chipmaker Nvidia Inc. is investing £40 million (US$51.9 million) in building a supercomputer in Cambridge, U.K., to be dedicated to applying artificial intelligence in drug discovery and in health care.
Recursion Inc.’s combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence, coupled to its wet lab work, caught Bayer AG’s attention so solidly that its investment unit, Leaps by Bayer, led the charge on Recursion’s new and oversubscribed $239 million series D financing.
Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) presented a new artificial intelligence technique that could protect medical imaging systems from hacking and human errors at the 2020 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME) on Aug. 26. Their innovative solution uses a dual-layer architecture that screens for two different types of anomalous instructions to capture those that are always unusual or outside of safe ranges and those that are inappropriate in the specific context.
While the retail, security and entertainment sectors dove in early with the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, the life sciences sector has “been a bit of a laggard, frankly,” said Pratap Khedkar, a principal at the Evanston, Ill.-based consultant firm ZS Associates.
The importance of artificial intelligence and machine learning continues to be acknowledged by drug development companies. Recently, to help accelerate the discovery of therapies to treat COVID-19, several deals have been forged to deploy those tools.
LONDON – Exscientia Ltd. has closed a $60 million series C funding, attracting Novo Holdings as new investor to lead the round, which will enable the artificial intelligence (AI) specialist to progress its first in-house program to the clinic before the end of 2020.
Nineteengale Therapeutics is a new joint venture that was launched to fill a large void. Cyclica Inc., along with its partner, Neurotheryx Canada Ltd., both of Toronto, created Nineteengale to find and develop cannabinoid-inspired drugs for bipolar disorder, anxiety and pain management.
HONG KONG – South Korea’s AI-based biotech venture, Kaipharm Co. Ltd. has secured ₩5 billion (US$4.22 million) in series A funding. Founded in 2018, the firm has attracted a total of ₩7 billion in investments. Kaipharm will generate a reference dataset of 2,000 drugs (KMAP_2K) using next-generation sequencing (NGS). The dataset will include all the FDA-approved drugs to date.
Multiple tactics employed by the biopharma industry to improve the recruitment and retention of participants in clinical trials seem to be paying off. More than three of four (77%) studies now fully enroll on or ahead of schedule, according to researchers at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD), reporting in the January/February Tufts CSDD Impact Report on global recruitment performance benchmarks.
When Zebiai Therapeutics Inc.’s CEO, Rick Wagner, went about naming his new machine learning company, he wanted it to connote something dramatic that displayed the company’s potential to reach into the seemingly boundless future technology had unlocked.
