AI company Absci and St John’s Cancer Institute (SJCI) have entered a partnership to uncover breakthrough cancer therapies.
The companies will use Absci’s Integrated Drug Creation platform, which combines generative AI models and proprietary wet-lab technologies, and SJCI’s cancer biospecimen repository and molecular database to identify new therapeutic candidates with a higher probability of clinical success.
The partners hope to expand the search and discovery space for novel antibodies, immunomodulatory molecules, and drug targets for a diverse set of solid tumour cancers.
The initial focus will be on urological and gastrointestinal cancers where there is a major need to bring novel treatments to more cancer patients.
Sean McClain, Founder and CEO of Absci, said: “Currently, it takes about ten years and costs over $1 billion to bring one drug to market for patients. The combination of our generative AI platform and SJCI’s large biorepositories and related molecular analysis database can accelerate the development of better biologics for patients, faster.”
Through the partnership, Absci will integrate SJCI’s annotated molecular data assets into its target discovery platform. The novel targets will be screened and assessed for parameters important to drug development and for functional and mechanistic validation using Absci’s AI capabilities.
As a component of the partnership, Absci and SJCI may also choose to further expand the collaboration through the development of therapeutic candidates towards IND-enabling studies and clinical trials, as well as conducting early-stage clinical trials for newly discovered therapeutics at St John’s Cancer Institute.
