The Agenda 👇
News bulletin 📰
Insilico Medicine
Recent funding in longevity 💰
Upcoming events 📅
Jobs in longevity 🧑💼
1/ News bulletin 📰
💊 Leprosy offers clues to liver regeneration - Publication in Cell suggests one of the world’s oldest pathogens have a surprising ability regenerate a vital organ
🧠 NEJM publishes lecanemab Alzheimer’s study results - Full study results of Eisai’s Phase III Alzheimer’s study suggest lecanemab could slow disease progression
⏰ FDA bans NMN from being sold as a dietary supplement in the US - as product has been authorised for investigation as a new drug
🧬 Global decline in sperm counts continue to accelerate - new study finds that decline since 1972 averaged 1% a year, but since 2000 has grown to more than 2.6%
🏥 Sheba Hospital launches new longevity centre - aimed to empower patients with data and strategies to optimise and extend their healthspan
2/ Insilico Medicine
Within the longevity research community, Alex Zhavoronkov looms large for the breadth of his work and success of his ventures. In February, Insilico Medicine, the AI drug development company he founded, announced the first phase 1 clinical trials for a wholly AI-developed drug. Following a series of investment rounds in the rest of the year, the company is now well-funded, and its software is widely used in the pharma industry.
Drug development is a long and complicated business, but it can be divided into three phases: disease process modelling, molecule design and testing for efficacy and safety. The first step usually involves understanding what causes a given disease. The culprit is usually a protein, or a set of them and there are more than 60,000 targets to go after, and 10,000 diseases. This first phase is the most important of the three, and is usually done in academia, where it costs billions of dollars to develop a hypothesis, and 95% of them turn out to be false. Insilico has created a software platform called Pandaomics to generate these hypotheses and comprises more than 20 AI models, which are trained on huge public data repositories.
Insilico’s platform also supports the second phase of molecule design, with a tool called Chemistry 42. Traditionally pharma companies will test thousands of molecules to see if they bind to the target protein, however AI allows you to look at how a protein folds and model the molecules which might bind to it. This means only a dozen or so molecules which have the desired characteristics need to be tested. Insilico does this with a variety of Generative Adversarial AI Networks, or GANs, and some transformer models.
Insilico’s platform also solves for the third phase of drug development with its final tool called InClinico. This tool re-uses some of the AI models from the other two platforms, although it is the company’s oldest platform. It is trained on massive data sets about previous clinical trials and has been validated on drugs which have made it all the way through the pipeline.
Insilico and other companies using AI to develop drugs have cut the time and money involved in the process by as much as 90%. Even more important, they have increased the success rate of candidate drugs.
One way to shorten the timeline of drug development is to re-purpose existing drugs for new diseases, since they are already known to be safe for human use. The problem with this is that either somebody else owns the intellectual property (IP) in these drugs, and requiring one to license them, or they are already generic, which means there is little prospect of earning a commercial return on the development costs.
Insilico Medicine, and similar companies, are dramatically revolutionising the drug development process, and are creating opportunities for longevity related therapeutics to be designed and enter the market. As biotech takes a battering from the capital market, novel solutions to cut costs in the drug development process will take centre stage.
3/ Recent funding in longevity 💰
4/ Upcoming events 📅
🇺🇸 The Longevity Summit will be hosting their second annual event in Novato, CA on December 7-8th. The event will unite top longevity entrepreneurs, pharma and biotech companies, longevity investors, researchers, and government organisations from around the world.
🇵🇹 Longevity Med Summit will focus on the development of ageing science, regenerative medicine, and longevity therapeutics. This two-day summit will take place in Lisbon, Portugal on May 4 - May 5, 2023 and feature five themes: Longevity Therapeutics, P4 Medicine, Diagnostics, AI and Digital, and a showcase of new trials and research.
🇺🇸 Longevity Biotech Meetup Cambridge is a casual Boston/Cambridge longevity biotech meetup hosted by ODLB and Lifespan.io, on December 10 on 12:30 pm - 2:30 pm EST. Attendees can connect with ODLB members and other members of the longevity biotech community over drinks on an early Saturday afternoon. This is a free, all-ages event.
5/ Jobs in longevity 🧑💼
Calico Labs // Principal Program Manager // South San Francisco, CA
Arda Therapeutics // Associate Scientist // San Carlos, CA
Altos Labs // US general interest - UK general interest // US - UK
Cambrian Bio // Product Manager - Geroscience // New York, NY
Insilico Medicine // Business Development Consultant // Europe, Remote