Charles River Laboratories and Valence Discovery have teamed up to provide clients access to Valence’s artificial intelligence platform for molecular property prediction, generative chemistry, and multiparameter optimisation.
Building on research done by Valence’s founding team at Mila, a deep learning research institute, the Valence platform enables the design of small molecule drug candidates in novel regions of chemical space, followed by rapid optimisation against project-specific potency, selectivity, safety, and pharmacology criteria.
Valence has pioneered the application of few-shot learning in drug design, allowing the company to unlock prediction tasks for which only small amounts of training data are available, overcoming a critical limitation of existing machine learning technologies in drug discovery.
According to the organisations the alliance has the potential to significantly accelerate discovery efforts from hit design through lead optimisation.
Through the collaboration, Charles River clients will have the option to access Valence’s platform to support their drug discovery efforts.
Birgit Girshick, Corporate Executive Vice President, Discovery and Safety Assessment, Biologics Testing Solutions, and Avian Vaccine Services, Charles River said: “This collaboration reflects Charles River’s ongoing commitment to enhancing our portfolio of innovative technology solutions. We look forward to leveraging Valence’s unique platform to improve outcomes for our clients.”
Daniel Cohen, CEO of Valence Discovery said: “We are thrilled to be partnering with Charles River, a global leader trusted by many of the world’s top pharmaceutical and biotech companies. This collaboration is an important step in furthering our mission of empowering every drug discovery scientist with the latest innovations in AI-enabled drug design.”
