Model Medicines is betting its high-powered algorithms can speed up drug discovery
One biotech’s abandoned drug could be another’s big break.
That’s the idea behind Model Medicines, a San Diego startup that uses artificial intelligence to find new uses for existing drugs. The company has announced partnerships with Denmark’s LEO Pharma and San Diego’s Scripps Research Institute in the past couple of weeks to find new drugs for inflammatory skin diseases and COVID-19, respectively.
“We’re a company that really believes in leveraging what information is out there about particular drugs rather than going out and reinventing the wheel,” said George Nicola, founder of Model Medicines.
Model Medicines uses algorithms to scan 20,000 drug compounds that have made it through initial clinical trials and 4,000 compounds that have received Food and Drug Administration approval. The algorithms perform billions of calculations that analyze 10,000 features of each molecule’s structure.
That computational tour de force allows Nicola to identify new proteins that these small molecules likely interact with. If these proteins contribute to certain diseases, then the molecule could be a useful treatment, even if it wasn’t originally tested for those diseases.
Because the molecules Model Medicines analyzes have already gone through a Phase 1 clinical trial, they’re less of a risky investment for companies to pursue, Nicola says, though scientists still must confirm that the molecules behave the way the algorithms predict. About 37 percent of drugs fail Phase 1 trials, according to a report by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a national biotech trade group.
Once Model Medicines identifies promising drug candidates, LEO Pharma and Scripps scientists will then test those molecules on their own. Nicola says the company doesn’t have a specific timeline for either collaboration, but that its high-powered algorithms shorten the process of getting a drug into clinical trials from years to months.
Model Medicines launched in 2019 from the Nex Cubed Digital Health Venture Studio, an incubator and accelerator that works closely with startups. The company has four full-time employees.
This article originally appeared on The San Diego Union Tribune, prior to the rebrand of Repurpose.AI to Model Medicines, read the full article here.
