This article explores the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery and development,
discussing the obstacles holding back wider adoption. Dr Mark Eller, Senior Vice President of Research
and Development at Aria Pharmaceuticals, makes the case that to succeed, AI must be integrated as a
partner alongside core pharmaceutical R&D disciplines.
This article explores the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery and development,
discussing the obstacles holding back wider adoption. Dr Mark Eller, Senior Vice President of Research
and Development at Aria Pharmaceuticals, makes the case that to succeed, AI must be integrated as a
partner alongside core pharmaceutical R&D disciplines.
There has never been more discussion about the usefulness, and proper use of, artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery. When Aria first started utilizing AI as a tool in the early drug discovery process, much of that conversation centered on AI as a panacea that will revolutionize healthcare. Not a useful conversation and not a practical use of AI.
Aria Pharmaceuticals is using a unique computational approach to drug development that has increased its success rate by 30-fold when compared to traditional approaches. This improvement was instrumental in developing the 18-compound pipeline at this preclinical stage, small molecule company.
Aria Pharmaceuticals CEO Andrew Radin will be a featured speaker discussing the improvement of the discovery of novel drugs with artificial intelligence on Feb 3, 2022.
2021 was a year of growth and transformational change at Aria Pharmaceuticals. In recognition of our continued evolution, we announced a rebrand to a new name that reflects the artistry and complexity that defines how our company and scientific teams approach medicine, from discovery to clinical research to FDA approval, while always keeping the science our number one priority.
Half of all Americans live with at least one chronic disease, such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, or diabetes. Chronic diseases—which are, broadly defined, health conditions that persist for 1 year or longer, that typically require ongoing medical attention, and that can interfere with the activities of daily living (CDC, 2021b)—are a major health concern in the United States and around the world. Chronic diseases are the leading cause of death and disability in the United States and are a leading driver of health care costs (CDC, 2021a).
Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is devastating. It causes lung tissue scarring that becomes thicker over time, causing chronic pain and difficulty breathing. However, it’s not just the physical toll of the disease that impacts patients, it’s also a significant decline in quality of life.
Small molecule drug developer Aria Pharmaceuticals (Palo Alto, Calif.) recently revealed that two investigational treatments for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), TXR-1002 and TXR-1007, demonstrated promising results in preclinical research.
TXR-1002 and TXR-1007, two new therapeutic candidates for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) from Aria Pharmaceuticals, demonstrated significant efficacy at reducing tissue scarring and good tolerability in a mouse model of the disease
Small molecule drug developer Aria Pharmaceuticals (Palo Alto, Calif.) has announced that two investigational treatments for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), TXR-1002 and TXR-1007, demonstrated efficacy and tolerability in preclinical research.
Harry traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area this summer, and while there he interviewed the co-founders of three local data-driven diagnostics and drug discovery startups, all of whom participated in the same graduate program: the Biomedical Informatics Program at Stanford’s School of Medicine.
Since we have now rebranded twoXAR Pharmaceuticals as Aria Pharmaceuticals, I’m often asked “Why that name?” The dictionary defines the word “aria” as a long musical piece typically written for a solo voice with orchestral accompaniment in an opera, a theatrical work which combines drama, music, song and dance. You might be wondering, what does drug discovery and development have to do with opera?
Aria Pharmaceuticals will transition from drug discovery partnerships to advancing its own novel therapies in an expanding pipeline across 18 different therapeutic programs.
I recently authored an article in Life Science Leader discussing my own misperceptions and preconceived notions about applying AI to an extremely challenging and complex process, drug discovery. Like many, my 30-year career in pharmaceuticals was rooted in the tried-and-true methodology of the traditional R&D process, with wins few and far between. But my dissatisfaction for the lengthy and often unsuccessful process to bring new molecules to market reached a heightened sense of urgency in 2017 when I started consulting for twoXAR and realized there might be a better way. I wanted to take a moment here and share what exactly drove me to the conviction I now have.
Both TXR-1208 and TXR-1210 demonstrated significant decrease in kidney fibrosis and inflammation compared to TGFbeta mAb, the standard metric for positive efficacy.
Every year, for the past 39 years, the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference has been one of the most reliable predictors of our industry’s health. It’s a gauge of industry innovation, deal making, funding and overall sentiment about the value of the pharmaceutical market.
Without a doubt, 2020 has been a trying year. The pandemic has touched every business and every human on earth in different ways. And despite all of its tragic outcomes, it has starkly reminded me that we work in one of the most exciting and innovative industries in the world — the life sciences industry.
When this virus became a serious public threat at the beginning of this year, multiple AI companies shifted their focus to using AI to fight coronavirus and their approaches are varied, ranging from drug repurposing to finding novel molecules.
When discussing the role of AI in Covid-19, we have to reframe this conversation and look at AI as an important approach that can provide better analysis and ultimately better outcomes for patients, not as replacing the entirety of the drug discovery process or as a magic bullet for a vaccine.
twoXAR Pharmaceuticals SVP Nonclinical R&D & Chemistry Anjali Pandey moderates a panel including twoXAR CEO Andrew Radin, along with representatives from Recursion Pharma, ATOM Consortium, and NuMedii.
twoXAR Pharmaceuticals CEO Andrew Radin presents on the company’s capabilities in discovering first-in-class small molecules for oncology and more using AI.
Mark Eller spent 12 years at Jazz Pharmaceuticals; and is now senior vice president of research and development at twoXAR, an AI-driven drug discovery startup.
When MIT mathematician Jim Simmons founded Renaissance Technologies in 1988, it was unfathomable that computers driven by algorithms might outperform top Wall Street fund managers. Today, after a more than thirty year average return of 66% per annum, the Renaissance model of applying machine learning techniques to invest in a manner that is automated, dispassionate and performed with minimal human intervention is widely accepted. Quantitative finance, as it is dubbed, has profoundly reshaped the financial industry.
Harry welcomes back Andrew A. Radin, CEO of the drug discovery startup twoXAR, where scientists model pathogenesis computationally to identify potential drug molecules and, ideally shaving years off the drug development process.
Through the use of artificial intelligence and concepts including machine and deep learning, the life sciences sector is seeing unprecedented levels of speed and efficiency in finding new drug candidates and pushing them towards commercialization. Yet integrating the complexity of AI and big data into healthcare still presents problems and challenges whether from a financing point of view or operationally.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to be usefully deployed in almost every industry from customer call centers and finance to drug research. Yet the field is also plagued by relentless hype, opaque jargon and esoteric technology making it difficult for outsiders identify the most interesting companies.
Innovation in the San Francisco Bay Area may first bring to mind tech behemoths like Facebook and Google. But some drug development companies in the region say its openness to new ideas and the combination of software experience and life sciences expertise are boosting their prospects.
The novel investigational agent TXR-311 has been selected as an in vivo candidate for the potential treatment of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) after demonstrating significant efficacy compared with the standard of care in preclinical studies, announced twoXAR Pharmaceuticals.
Preclinical data presented today during the virtual meeting II of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), being held June 22 – 24, 2020, shows that an investigational drug called TXR-311 demonstrated significant efficacy and good tolerability in in vivo studies for the potential treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).
In validation studies, TRX-311 demonstrated greater activity and selectivity in killing HCC tumor cells than standard of care, sorafenib, and significantly inhibited growth in two HCC patient-derived xenograft (PDX) tumor models. TRX-311 also demonstrated in vivo efficacy comparable to sorafenib with good tolerability.
This recently released Radar determines the top 16 industry leaders excelling at innovation, poised for partnerships, and ripe for investment. The companies are recognized in the Frost Radar with insight into their innovative offerings, projected increase rates, strengths and strategies on how to be more effective in the future.
twoXAR Pharmaceuticals VP Discovery, Aaron Daugherty, joins DrugBank CEO Michael Wilson in an online fireside chat on using DrugBank data sources for drug discovery.
Twoxar Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., said that two leads for the potential treatment of systemic lupus erythematosus, TXR-711 and TXR-712, demonstrated significant efficacy and excellent tolerability in preclinical studies. The data were accepted at the 12th European Lupus Congress and published in Lupus Science & Medicine.
This week we are celebrating the release of the 250th version of our drug discovery software platform! I am so incredibly proud of the improvements our software team is constantly pushing out; it is the foundation that supports twoXAR’s dedication to rapidly identifying treatments for patients in need.
Dr. Eller is an accomplished pharmaceutical industry executive who brings 30 years of R&D experience. Dr. Pandey is a leader in the pharmaceutical industry bringing 25 years of experience in all stages of drug discovery and development.
The partnership combines shared drug discovery expertise with integrated AI to identify promising targets in half the time of traditional R&D approaches.
The JPMorgan Chase conference is centrally a finance and investor meeting. And what we’ve seen so far is that healthcare investors continue to bet on AI startups at an unprecedented rate. This trend is not slowing.
2019 saw tremendous growth for twoXAR. We launched nine new disease areas, expanding to new disease programs in our focus areas of ophthalmology, immunology & inflammatory, oncology and metabolic. We ended the year with eighteen total diseases in our portfolio, six of which have been out licensed.
Many believe AI is the panacea that will revolutionize the healthcare industry, and dollars are flowing into healthcare AI startups at unprecedented rates as investors make big bets on using the technology to analyze health data, improve efficiency in healthcare delivery, speed drug discovery, and offer new therapies for intractable diseases.
Allen’s experience forging strategic alliances in the life sciences industry will be a tremendous asset to twoXAR as the company continues to partner with leading biopharmaceutical companies to discover and develop first-in-class treatments for a wide range of diseases.
SK Biopharmaceuticals, a pharmaceutical company focused on disorders of central nervous system and cancer, and twoXAR, Inc., an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven biopharmaceutical company, today announced an agreement to discover and develop first-in-class therapeutics for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
In the last several months, SKBP has achieved several remarkable drug development milestones, including the first FDA approval of an SKBP-discovered drug (Sunosi™, for excessive daytime sleepiness associated with narcolepsy or obstructive sleep apnea, which has been licensed to Jazz Pharmaceuticals) and FDA acceptance of their NDA submission for cenobamate, an investigational antiepileptic drug.
HONG KONG – Asian drugmakers are increasingly embracing the artificial intelligence (AI) technology for drug discovery. The latest example is Japanese drug developer Ono Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., which recently entered a partnership with U.S. AI-backed biotech firm twoXAR Inc.
Researching new drug candidates in neurology with Ono represents a return to our roots at twoXAR. With Ono’s global history of drug development, we are confident we have found the right industry partner to work with.
Ono Pharmaceutical and twoXAR announced that the companies have signed a drug discovery research collaboration to jointly discover and develop novel, efficacious treatments to address unmet medical needs in a specific neurological disease.
twoXAR and South Korea’s 1ST Biotherapeutics are joining forces to discover and develop new treatments for glioblastoma, the most aggressive kind of brain cancer. Under the deal, twoXAR will identify drug candidates using its artificial intelligence platform, both partners will select promising candidates and 1ST Bio will develop them.
Glioblastoma multiforme (“glioblastoma”) is the most common and deadly form of brain cancer globally. It aggressively invades brain tissue and causes rapid onset of neurological symptoms. This invasion includes fostering a highly vascularized microenvironment and intricate interactions between tumor and non-tumor cells within the brain which promotes its growth and survival despite current treatments.
Under the agreement, twoXAR will use its proprietary AI technology to identify a set of drug candidates with the potential to slow, stop, or reverse the progression of glioblastoma.
Harry interviews Andrew A. Radin, co-founder and CEO of twoXAR, an Artificial Intelligence driven drug discovery startup that unifies disparate data to identify potential disease treatments.
JP Lee, managing director of SoftBank Ventures, will join Andreessen Horowitz general partner Vijay Pande on the twoXAR board of directors. Palo Alto, California-based twoXAR reached this next stage of growth thanks to $3.4 million in seed funding it picked up in 2014 in part from Andreessen Horowitz.
Palo Alto, CA-based twoXAR has developed a drug discovery computing platform that it says is faster, less expensive, and more accurate than traditional laboratory approaches. The company claims it can identify drug candidates for testing “in weeks rather than years.” The company adds that the technology has yielded potential drugs in a wide range of diseases including liver cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and type 2 diabetes.
Traditionally, building a portfolio of drug programs requires hundreds of millions of dollars and takes many years in the biopharmaceutical industry. The convergence of available biomedical data, affordable cloud computing, and advances in algorithms is now enabling companies to build these drug portfolios for an order of magnitude less money and in a fraction of the time it traditionally takes. This is precisely what twoXAR is doing.
twoXAR, Inc., an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven biopharmaceutical company, announced today that it has raised $10 million in Series A financing led by SoftBank Ventures, a SoftBank Group early stage venture capital arm.
At twoXAR we bring together a lot of disparate data to rapidly identify disease treatments. It’s through these different data that we gain our predictive power. However, more data isn’t always better — not if the new data is of poor quality. In other words, quantity doesn’t trump quality, and that’s because of a common data science saying: bad data in = bad data out.
twoXAR has been named as one of the inaugural MIT Startup Exchange (STEX) STEX25 companies. STEX25 is a select group of industry-ready startups that are actively promoted to members of the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP).
Today we announced our collaboration with Santen, a world leader in the development of innovative ophthalmology treatments. Scientists at twoXAR will use our proprietary computational drug discovery platform to discover, screen and prioritize novel drug candidates with potential application in glaucoma. Santen will then develop and commercialize drug candidates arising from the collaboration. This collaboration is an exciting example of how artificial intelligence-driven approaches can move beyond supporting existing hypotheses and lead the discovery of new drugs.
twoXAR and Santen announced that the two companies have entered into a strategic research collaboration focused on the identification of new drug candidates for glaucoma.
Our focus is on drug development — and being one of the few biopharma companies to be included in the list, we use AI in a unique way. Where others may be using AI as the sole ingredient to enhance their respective industries, we are using it alongside a complex toolbox of data processing methods whose sum is greater than its parts.
twoXAR has developed the next generation of drug discovery technologies and is changing the way the biopharmaceutical industry discovers life saving treatments
It can take up to six years to accumulate enough evidence to support advancing an experimental drug into clinical development. twoXAR is working to rapidly accelerate that process through the use of Big Data and its proprietary algorithms to find screen large public and proprietary data sets to indentify new drug candidates and determine their efficacy. We spoke to Andrew Radin, co-founder and CEO of twoXAR, about the company’s technology, how it’s being applied today, and the evolution of the company’s strategy.
Many of us have experienced the pitfalls of a “one-size-fits” all approach to medicine, where physicians prescribe treatment for the “average patient” instead of the one sitting in front of them. By not accounting for the variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle that are often so closely tied to health and illness, treatments end up falling short and sometimes do more harm than good. Fortunately, the “precision medicine” movement, which takes into account the patient’s unique characteristics when prescribing treatment and prevention strategies, has gained traction in recent years.
The mindset of “move fast and break things”, while great for code, isn’t exactly great for the human body. So adding computation to biology — especially in the slow-moving pharmaceutical industry, where drug approval can take years — brings with it both opportunities (like drastically faster discovery and assessment) and challenges (the need for hard evidence, not just soft-ware). But there’s more: We don’t want just better outcomes for healthcare. We want better outcomes at a cheaper price.
twoXAR has raised $3.4 million in seed financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. twoXAR will use these funds to expand its engineering and commercial teams and advance the progress of new and existing partnerships focused on drug candidates for metabolic and neurological diseases.