Recently, AstraZeneca announced a partnership with BenevolentAI to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in discovering potential new drugs for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and chronic kidney disease (CKD).
Both companies are expected to come up with a team of scientists who will work together to integrate AstraZeneca’s clinical, chemistry and genomics data with BenevolentAI’s biomedical knowledge graph and target identification platform – a contextualized scientific data network including compounds, diseases, proteins, and genes, and the existing association between them.
The machine learning abilities of BenevolentAI systematically evaluates data to identify links between facts.
Artificial intelligence (AI) – powered reasoning is utilized in extrapolating formerly unidentified connections.
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BenevolentAI and AstraZeneca will leverage the technology in interpreting the outcomes in a bid to comprehend the underlying mechanism behind such complicated illnesses and rapidly spot new potential drug targets.
Mene Pangalos, the president and EVP of BioPharmaceuticals R&D, claimed: “The vast amount of data available to research scientists is growing exponentially each year.
By combining AstraZeneca’s disease area expertise and large, diverse datasets with BenevolentAI’s leading AI and machine learning capabilities, we can unlock the potential of this wealth of data to improve our understanding of complex disease biology and identify new targets that could treat debilitating diseases.”
Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and chronic kidney illness are sophisticated illnesses in which their underlying biology is not correctly understood.
The complexity of the illnesses calls for the interrogation of massive, rich datasets.
“Millions of people today suffer from diseases that have no effective treatment,” BenevolentAI CEO Joanna Shields said in a statement. “The future of drug discovery and development lies in bridging the gap between AI, data, and biology.”
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Before the close of 2019, AstraZeneca intends to help in submitting the first in an emerging class of oral-based therapies to the FDA, specifically for anaemia treatment linked with chronic kidney disease (CKD).
Existing anaemia treatments consist of erythropoietin replacement drugs that are either administered subcutaneously or intravenously.
Recently, FDA gave AstraZeneca an orphan drug label, particularly for its midphase Src Kinase inhibitor known as saracatinib.
The drug aims to slow down collagen deposition and fibroblast activity, which are the main features of the illness that causes not only scarring and thickening of the lung’s connective tissues but also a tissue buildup in the organ that blocks the flow of air.
“IPF is a recent addition to our respiratory research strategy and we are interested to see whether saracatinib could be a useful approach for the treatment of this intractable disease,”
claimed AstraZeneca’s Mene Pangalos, the executive vice president of R&D for the company’s BioPharmaceuticals division.
AstraZeneca is a global biopharmaceutical and pharmaceutical company that was founded back in 1999.
The company shifted its headquarters to the UK in 2013 and has an array of products for major ailment areas such as inflammation, respiratory, neuroscience, infection, gastrointestinal, cancer, and cardiovascular.
BenevolentAI is a United Kingdom-based AI company that is driven by its mission to transform how medicine is designed, made, tested, and distributed to the market using AI technology and computational medicine.
