Insilico Medicine, a Skolkovo resident from the biomedical technologies cluster, is working in collaboration with the Japanese pharmaceutical company Taisho Pharmaceutical. The collaboration is focused on finding a drug for age-related diseases and Taisho Pharmaceutical is utilizing Insilico’s AI-platform – Pandomics Discovery Platform – to facilitate this.
Screengrab: Insilico Medicine.
Taisho Pharmaceutical is a leading company in Japan and the collaboration shows the increasing role of AI in modern-day medicine, not to mention the active commercial interest in some of the activities underway at Skolkovo. Using Insilico’s platform, the two sides are working together to find senolytics – agents that selectively induce apoptosis (programmed cell death) in senescent cells which are associated with ageing and age-related diseases.
According to The Lancet journal, the increasing life expectancy of the global population, while offering many benefits, has become an economic and global public health problem due to the higher incidence of chronic conditions. This is in spite of unprecedented advances in prevention, diagnostics, and treatment. Unfortunately, senescent cells accumulate in multiple chronic diseases across the age range such as obesity and chronic kidney disease, diseases such as cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration and cancer. Even a low abundance of senescent cells (10-15%) is enough to cause tissue dysfunction, according to sources.
Insilico’s main role is in target search and generating molecules during the early stages of the research. Taisho Pharmaceutical, in collaboration with the Skolkovo resident, will work on validating the results of different in vitro and in vivo experiments. Taisho Pharmaceutical has the exclusive opportunity to gain joint ownership rights with Insilico for successfully developed programs.
According to Ivan Ozerov, the head of the bioinformatics department at Insilico, ageing is something that cannot be stopped but that new scientific data indicators show that it is in fact possible to reverse a number of negative phenomena that come with age. “In the framework of this collaboration, we are joining Insilico’s abilities in developing drugs using artificial intelligence and Taisho’s validation platform in order to create and explore new means of therapy for age-related diseases.”
Insilico’s founder and CEO Aleksander Zhavoronkov stated to Sk.ru that “the collaboration with Taisho is a great honor, as it is in the top-100 pharmaceutical companies in the world and has been going since 1912. The high level of training of the scientists with whom we interact, our previous success in adopting the Pandomics platform to search for new targets and active molecules against fibrosis, as well as the previous experience in developing senolytics, all inspire confidence in us and that the collaboration will be successful.”
Anton Borovik, the senior project manager of the biomedical technologies cluster at the Skolkovo Foundation, stated: “Insilico is one of the most dynamic companies in our cluster. The unique competence of the project team allows us to create world-class advanced technological products. The collaboration with Taisho Pharmaceutical reflects a high level of interest and confidence from the pharmaceutical sector towards Insilico’s Pandomics platform.”