Faster Path to Cancer Cure?

This week, in our Saturday deep dive, we look at a fascinating collaboration announced this week in the pharmaceutical world. Astra Zeneca, a pharma behemoth, have partnered with Absci, a generative AI company specialising in the drug discovery process. This partnership could hugely accelerate the search for innovative cancer drugs using futuristic AI. Let’s get into it…

Typically, developing a single new medicine takes over a decade and costs billions—but Absci’s technology slashes this timeline down to just weeks. How? Their secret weapon is a clever AI that mimics human creativity, designing promising drug candidates in a flash. This could supercharge the slow, unpredictable trial-and-error process that pharmaceutical companies depend on today.

As it stands, your immune system fights disease using special proteins called antibodies. Traditionally, researchers would painstakingly grow and test thousands of these antibody candidates over years to hopefully stumble upon a match for their disease target. Absci’s AI completely flips this approach on its head.

After "digesting" mountains of data on what works, their AI begins conjuring up antibody ideas without any examples to guide it. It’s like if you designed radically new video game characters having only ever seen furniture! Maybe not the best analogy, but hopefully you get the idea. It’s basically using its training to create a framework which allows it to think outside the box. This “zero-shot” creativity allows it to uncover unexpected antibodies that researchers would likely never invent themselves.

These AI-birthed antibody ideas then undergo real-world testing. This is the crucial step. Failures get fed back into the AI to make it smarter. Successes move forward into treatment development. By rapidly looping between digital designing and physical testing, Absci can compress a 5+ year process into just 6 weeks!

Through this partnership, AstraZeneca brings their cancer expertise to identify targets, while Absci contributes their AI drug designer. Teaming seasoned scientists with cutting-edge technology will push boundaries, exploring creative ideas at breakneck pace.

The fruits of this collaboration could profoundly impact cancer patients worldwide. Traditionally, only 5 in 5,000 drug candidates ever reach clinical trials, and just a fraction of those get approved. But AI accelerated discovery promises to deliver more high-quality candidates faster, giving more shots on goal towards life changing treatments. Even if the percentage of approvals remains unchanged, the fact that we will be able to push thousands more drug compounds through to clincial trials should result in rapid advances in the short term.

This pioneering alliance signals a new era of AI and human collaboration in drug discovery. By fusing human ingenuity with artificial creativity, we can realise unprecedented medical breakthroughs that save patient lives. The future looks bright.

To learn more about the methodology Absci deploy to create drug discoveries, please visit www.absci.com/technology