AI in the Preclinical Phase of Drug Development

The growing demand for ML/AI technologies, as well as for ML/AI talent, in the pharmaceutical industry is driving the formation of a new interdisciplinary field: data-driven drug discovery/healthcare. Consequently, there is a growing number of AI driven startups offering technology solutions for drug discovery/development.

In drug development, preclinical phase (in vitro and in vivo), also named preclinical studies and nonclinical studies, is a stage of research that begins before clinical trials, and during which important feasibility, iterative testing and drug safety data are collected. The most common challenges faced by all AI startups in design and execution of preclinical experiments have to do with:

1) reduce time, money, and uncertainty in planning preclinical experiments,

2) decode open and closed access data on reagents and get actionable insights,

3) automate selection, manipulation and analysis of cells, and

4) automate sample analysis with robotic cloud laboratory.

According to a detailed mind-map prepared by Pharma Division of Deep Knowledge Analytics (updated Q1 2019): the AI for Drug Discovery, Biomarker Development and Advanced R&D Industry Landscape counts so far ~400 investors, ~170 companies and 50 corporations. This article focuses only on the AI startups and the AI investors trying to overcome the above 4 challenges during design and execution of the preclinical phase.

Investors in the AI preclinical design and execution phase

Afore Capital raises second pre-seed venture capital fund

Afore Capital (California US, 2016) is a venture capital firm specializing in startups at the pre-seed stage and early-stage startups. Invests into: BenchSci

Golden Ventures (Toronto Canada, 2011) is an incubator, accelerator, and a venture capital firm specializing in seed, startup, early stage, Series A, and growth capital investments. It seeks to invests in internet and mobile startups regardless of sector including e-commerce, payments, marketplaces, mobile applications, and SaaS platforms. It invests across Southeast Asia, with key markets being Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand. Golden Gate Ventures is based in Singapore with an additional office in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco, California and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Invests into: BenchSci

Inovia Capital (Montréal Canada, 2007) is a venture capital firm specializing in investments in early stage, seed, mid venture, late venture, growth capital and start-up stage companies. The firm seeks to invest in companies with a focus on mobile, consumer Internet, SaaS, Internet communications, software, digital media, information technology, telecommunication, e-commerce, connected devices, healthcare etc. The firm seeks to invest in companies across Europe, North America and Quebec. Invests into: BenchSci, Future Family, WorkFusion

Gradient Ventures (California US, 2017) is a venture fund from Google with technical mentorship for early-stage startups focused on AI. Through Gradient, Google will provide portfolio companies with capital, resources, and dedicated access to experts and bootcamps in AI. Invests into: BenchSci

Healthbox (Chicago US, 2010) helps organizations build and sustain innovation strategies through consulting and fund management services. It also helps organizations source potential solutions or investments from outside the organization. Invests into: Desktop Genetics

Boundary Capital (London UK, 2009) is a venture capital company focusing on early stage growth companies, primarily in the technology space. The company’s headquarters are in London and it covers investments throughout the UK. Invests into: Desktop Genetics, Warwick Analytics

IQ Capital Partners LLP (Cambridge UK, 2006) is a team of serious and approachable partners with deep tech knowledge, who have been working together for over 20 years helping tech companies rapidly scale. IQ Capital has achieved numerous exits, recently to Google, Apple, Becton Dickinson and Huawei and several high profile IPOs, including Autonomy. Invests into: AI Bloomsbury, Spectral Edge, Privitar, Focal Point Positioning, BioBeats, Desktop Genetics, KisanHub

London Co-Investment Fund (LCIF) (London UK, 2014) together with six co-investment partners were committed to invest over £80m, from 2014 to 2017, in 150+ Science, Technology or Digital companies, based in London. LCIF is founded and managed by Funding London and Capital Enterprise with an initial investment of £25m from the Mayor of London’s Growing Places Fund. Invests into: Desktop Genetics

UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (Oxfordshire UK, 2002) is backed by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Fund’s partners are 9 publicly funded research bodies, including STFC, BBSRC, NERC and Dstl. The Fund is independently managed by venture capital specialist Midven. It helps build companies from great science developed in laboratories, science and technology campuses and synthetic biology. It holds investments in some of the UK’s most innovative companies, in areas as diverse as novel antibiotics, research into Alzheimer’s disease, “green” chemicals and airport security. Invests into: Atelerix, CellCentric, Cytox, Eagle Genomics, Spectral Edge, Desktop Genetics, Synthace

Luminous Ventures (Luxembourg, 2015) founded by partners Isabel Fox and Lomax Ward, is an early stage venture fund, investing in daring, visionary founders with breakthrough technologies and innovative ideas that can positively change the world. Backed by a network of families, they invest from Seed onwards in UK, Europe and Asia. The Luminous Ventures portfolio includes: Hadean, Synthace, BioBeats, FaceSoft, Active Global, Astroscreen and Beyond.

Sofinnova Partners (Paris France, 1972) is an independent venture capital firm based in Paris, France. With 1.1 billion of funds under management, Sofinnova Partners experienced team and hands-on approach in building portfolio companies through to exit have created market leaders, from landmark historical investments including Genentech, Actelion and Vistaprint to more recent successes such as CoreValve, Novexel and Fovea. With a global mindset, the firm has a sister organization in San Francisco, California. Invests into: MISSION Therapeutics, Synthace, ObsEva, Auris Medical

Holtzbrinck Digital (Munich Germany, 2010) is the internet-investment arm of the publishing group Georg von Holtzbrinck and one of the leading internet investors in Germany. When selecting its investments, Holtzbrinck Digital focuses on market leaders with proven business models, capability for further development and growth in cooperation with Holtzbrinck Digital, and willingness to make a long-term commitment. Holtzbrinck Digital is not looking for a quick exit, but rather to achieve sustainable joint success in the market. Invests into: Transcriptic

Varian (California US, 1948) provides complete solutions, including instruments, vacuum products, laboratory consumable supplies, software, training and support through its global distribution and support systems. Invests into: Berkeley Lights

Nikon (Chiba Japan, 1917) manufactures and sells optical instruments in Japan and internationally. It operates through three segments: Imaging Products Business, Precision Equipment Business and Healthcare Business. Invests into: Berkeley Lights

Black Diamond Ventures (California US, 1998) is a venture capital firm specializing in investments in early to mid-stage companies. The firm invests in biotechnology, medical devices, semiconductor design, data analytics and mobile platforms. Invests into: Berkeley Lights

Bioeconomy Capital (BeC)(Washington US, 2015) invests in early stage companies with the goal of accelerating the biotechnology revolution. Based on their startup operational expertise, product development experience, and globally recognized strategic analysis, they have developed a blueprint for building and deploying technological capabilities that will become critical infrastructure of the 21st century economy. Invests into: Synthace

KTB Network (Seongnam South Korea, 1981) is an investment company specialized in offering creative and accelerated growth of companies. They seek innovative and creative growth of the business with the most competent investment specialists group from various sectors. Invests into: Berkeley Lights, Celleron Therapeutics

Cota Capital Management LLC (California US, 2014) is a venture capital firm specializing in all stages of investments along with growth capital investments. The firm seeks to invest in the technology and financial technology sector with a focus on software companies. Invests into: Berkeley Lights

AI Startups in the preclinical design and execution phase

BenchSci: Design Preclinical Experiments, Advanced R&D/Toronto, Canada, 2015

BenchSci is committed to fight data reproducibility crisis in all biomedical realm where unreliable antibodies are in part responsible of the crisis: in fact up to half of all commercially available antibodies are unreliable. About 80% of life scientists use antibodies, spending $3 billion per year on more than 6 million products. But only half of commercially available antibodies are reliable, and finding them is a challenge.

Backed by Google’s AI fund and built by life scientists for life scientists, BenchSci is the world leader in AI-assisted antibody selection. With a 50% failure rate, inappropriate antibodies waste millions of research dollars and delay novel therapies by months. BenchSci’s AI solves this problem by reading biomedical papers like a PhD biologist to understand which antibodies have been successfully used in which experiments. Unlike traditional antibody search tools, BenchSci uses proprietary machine learning, bioinformatics ontologies, image recognition technologies, filters, and a figure-centric interface to enable rapid selection of experiment-specific antibodies. This reduces the cost of consumables and increases the impact of scientific research for more than 23,000 users at more than 2,000 academic institutions and 15 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies that trust BenchSci to guide their experiment design. Investors: Afore Capital, Golden Ventures, Gradient Ventures, iNovia Capital, Radical Ventures, Real Ventures, 500 Startups

On June 2019 it was announce that BenchSci has raised approximately $6.7 million CAD in financing, bringing its total funding to $27 million CAD ($20 million USD). The round was led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund, and BenchSci was Gradient Ventures’ first investment outside of the US.

Desktop Genetics: Intelligent data analysis, Healthcare/London UK, 2012

Desktop Genetics is an international biotechnology company established in 2012 to help researchers discover and treat the root genetic causes of human disease. Today, Desktop Genetics is a recognised leader in genome editing technology, staffed by dedicated team of genome editing experts, bioinformaticians and data scientists, driven by the real-world impact of CRISPR technology. Desktop Genetics has invested four years developing its core technology, DESKGEN AI, trained on the largest database of genome editing data in the world. DESKGEN AI powers its flagship DESKGEN CRISPR Library product range, which enables the work of its pharma, biotech and academic customers working in drug discovery and functional genomics.

Desktop Genetics’ tools and technologies are used by over 1800 organisations all over the world, and its projects contribute directly to several key partnerships to bring CRISPR into the clinic. The company has received awards from Fast Company, Kairos 50 and SxSW Interactive. Investors: IQ Capital, London Co-Investment Fund (LCIF), Boundary Capital Partners LLP, Healthbox, Imperial Create Lab, IQ Capital Partners LLP, UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund, SyndicateRoom, Illumina Venture

Euretos: Preclinical Experiment Execution, Biomarker Development/Zuid-Holland The Netherlands, 2012

Euretos is a bioinformatics company providing a discovery platform for identification and validation of targets and biomarkers. Euretos is an AI platform used by pre-clinical researchers for in-silico discovery & validation of targets and biomarkers. World leading pharma, biotech and academic institutions use it to accelerate their research.

Elsevier Connect, the news site of Elsevier, recently announced that the Euretos AI Pilot with Elsevier was one of the top 10 of most viewed news articles for 2018. On July 2018 a paper titled How AI technology can tame the scientific literature was published on Nature and Euretos was mentioned. In a recent publication in Nature Scientific Reports researchers at the Leiden and Rotterdam medical universities have used Euretos AI Platform data to train a machine learning model that predicts with 92.2% accuracy whether a drug will be successful in clinical trial. They were able to validate this model with a qualitative analysis of drug repurposing candidates for Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease.

Emerald Cloud Club (ECL): Drug Design, Drug Discovery/California US, 2010

Emerald was founded in 2010 by two scientists and life-long friends from Philadelphia with a singular vision of how a biotechnology company should run. Frustrated by the continual deceleration of innovation and the exponentially increasing R&D costs in the pharmaceutical sector, Emerald models itself after the legendary start-up companies of the mid-20th century that built the core technologies underlying the meteoric rise of the semiconductor industry. The team places as much focus on building tools around how scientific research is conducted as they do on their proprietary anti-viral therapies. Investors: OS Fund, Schooner Capital, Western Technology Investment, Founders Fund, Sound Ventures

Founders Fund, where Peter Thiel is a partner has invested in Emerald Cloud Lab: a South San Francisco-based warehouse filled with a slew of million-dollar robots. Users can log on to their website from anywhere in the world, enter the experimental protocol that they’d like to perform, and the robots will take care of the rest. Entire experiments, which would normally take scientists weeks, are performed in hours with higher precision. And though the idea sounds crazy on paper, it’s exactly the sort of “internet-based solution” that Silicon Valley loves.

Synthace: Machine Learning, Healthcare/London UK 2011

Synthace’s goal is to raise universal bioscience productivity, enabling people to better engineer biology for health, food, energy and manufacturing. Central to its technology is Antha, an operating system for biology that enables ease of designing and optimizing biological unit operations that are linked into executable workflows that are reliable, shareable and saleable.

Antha spreads biological information in a repeatable way, linking lab equipment, protocols and processes, thereby allowing vast and speedy development, enhancing productivity for any bioscience. Investors: Luminous Ventures, 11.2 Capital, Bioeconomy Capital, Sofinnova Partners, UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund, White Cloud Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, Horizons Ventures, SOSV

Berkeley Lights: Preclinical Experiment Execution, Advanced R&D/California US, 2011

Berkeley Lights, Inc. provides technology solution for single cell manipulation for biopharma, diagnostics, and life science research in order to automate drug discovery/development and genomic research. Berkeley Lights, Inc. has a strategic collaboration with TPG Biologics, Inc. for cell line development (Berkeley Lights’ OptoElectro Positioning technology with AI-based cell counting). Investors: AJS Investments, Black Diamond Ventures, Cota Capital, Lucas Venture Group, Nikon, Paxion Capital Partners, Shangbay Capital, Varian, Walden Riverwood Ventures, KTB Network, Atinum Investment, Sequoia Capital

Berkeley Lights announced on September 2019 the opening of a representative office in Pudong, Shanghai. The new location was established to provide regional marketing and pre-sales service to biotech, pharmaceutical, and academic customers in China and throughout the Asia Pacific (APAC) region .On October 2019 was announced that Ginkgo Bioworks and Berkeley Lights have inked a $150 million deal to incorporate Berkeley Lights’ Beacon optofluidic platform into Ginkgo’s automated genetic engineering foundries. Berkeley Lights’ platform captures, manipulates, and characterizes many individual cells in parallel. Incorporating it into the workflows of Ginkgo’s automated foundries is expected to more than triple Ginkgo’s capacity to measure the performance of cells, increasing the speed and efficiency with which it can deliver products to customers.

Transcriptic: Design Preclinical Experiments, Advanced R&D/California US, 2012

Transcriptic is a SaaS-based biotechnology company providing robotic solutions for biology labs, using the power of automation along with AI and machine learning. By expressing life science methods as data, infrastructure virtualization will become possible. Science-as-a-Service will power the next generation of discovery, driven by huge efficiencies of both time and money. Investors: AME Cloud Ventures, Data Collective DCVC, Digital Science, Holtzbrinck Digital, MITS Fund, Silicon Badia, UpHonest Capital, IA Ventures, ZhenFund, Founders Fund, GV, Silicon Valley Bank, Techammer, WuXi AppTec, Y Combinator

On June 2019 Transcriptic and 3Scan, a digital 3D tissue model specialist, have announced a merger to form the company Strateos. The newly formed entity combines the engineering capabilities of the two previous companies to help automate chemical, biological and 3D image analysis in a closed loop robotic laboratory, with the aim of accelerating drug discovery programs.

Arctoris: Preclinical Experiment Execution, Advanced R&D/Oxford UK

Arctoris is a service for academic research groups and biotech companies, allowing scientists to directly configure a wide range of cancer research experiments online, and receive their results and detailed methods reports immediately. Arctoris is not only capable of screening but is actually designed for fundamental research, encompassing a wide range of techniques to cover cellular and molecular biology.

The fully automated drug discovery platform Arctoris, announced on September 2019 that it has successfully closed a seed funding round of £3.2 million to advance its novel drug discovery offering. The funding will be used to further build out the company’s commercial operations and service portfolio, the latter of which enables customers to rapidly and accurately achieve drug discovery milestones from target identification to candidate characterisation, as well as dataset generation for artificial intelligence (AI/ML) model validation and training.