Quris, an artificial intelligence (AI) company in the pharmaceutical industry, has launched a clinical prediction AI platform to predict which drug candidates will safely work in humans. This will improve efficacy and cut drug development costs.
What do they do?
Quris uses AI-powered miniaturised “patients-on-a-chip” to avoid the risks and costs of failed clinical trials and eliminate the reliance on ineffective animal testing under the scientific leadership of Nobel Laureate Aaron Ciechanover and Dr Robert Langer, Co-founder of Moderna.
Watch Dr Langer tell Quris’ story at www.quris.ai
Official comments
“We are at the tipping point of the modernisation of drug discovery. I think the Quris platform could be of significant value to pharma companies and the health of society at large,” noted Dr Langer.
“Put simply: We are not mice so what works in animal-based trials is not a proper indicator of what will work for people,” added Ciechanover. “Using a breakthrough way to test drug candidates on miniaturised patients on chips, Quris can demonstrate their safety and efficacy, or lack thereof, through preliminary chip-based clinical trials. This has never been done before, and Quris is charting the path.” Watch this video for his full commentary on what makes Quris revolutionary.
Further developments
Focused initially on rare genetic diseases that cannot be modeled in animals, Quris also announced that it is prepping the first drug developed on the platform for clinical trials in 2022. The first Quris drug addresses Fragile X syndrome (FXS), the most common inherited cause of autism and intellectual disabilities worldwide.
“Our drug discovery process is broken, and technology darlings across biotech, artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data have not been able to overcome the colossal clinical trial failure rate,” added Dr. Kobi Richter, founder and chief technology officer of Medinol.
In partnership with The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute, Quris is developing a fully automated, self-training AI platform that better predicts clinical safety and efficacy for new drug candidates. Working with the world’s leading independent non-profit research institute dedicated to translating cutting-edge stem cell research into clinical breakthroughs and cures for patients, Quris will be able to benefit from NYSCF’s unmatched stem-cell automation technology.
Susan Solomon
Susan Solomon, Founder and CEO of the NYSCF Research Institute, who is joining the Quris Advisory Board, said: “Our team of scientists is excited about the collaboration with Quris, which leverages a powerful synergy between our stem-cell automation technology with Quris’s impressive AI-Chip-on-Chip technology platform and team, to better predict clinical safety of drugs for individual patients.” For more on Solomon’s perspective on the promise of research with stem cells, watch her TED Talk:
Context
With 18 granted and pending patents, its chip-on-chip platform uses a distinct combination of low-cost, disposable “miniaturised biology” chips and novel real-time nano-sensor and nano-circulation chips to continuously train the Quris AI engine and drug candidate safety and efficacy predictor. Combining the power of the NYSCF and Quris’ AI-based clinical prediction, high-throughput screening and stem cell disease modeling, the Quris platform will be trained on known safe and toxic drugs, so it can then rapidly screen thousands of potential drug formulations on hundreds of genetically diverse, miniaturised “patients-on-a-chip” to test efficacy at a fraction of the cost.
Seed funding
Coinciding with its public launch, the company also announced the close of an $9 million seed round of funding led by Dr Judith Richter and Dr Kobi Richter, experts in cardiovascular intervention therapeutics, with participation from Moshe Yanai, a disruptive data-storage technology leader, and strategic angel investors.
Led by the founding team, which holds 48 patents, has 12 FDA-approved products in the market and previously used this AI approach to disrupt genomics, discovering more novel micro-RNA genes than all of the world’s universities combined, the funding will be used to help Quris revolutionise the drug development process by accelerating its novel drug therapy research, amplifying partnership-building efforts and substantially growing its team.
