The 8 leading biotechs using AI to upend how drugs are discovered
Business Insider surveyed the landscape, focusing on biotech companies that have used AI to develop or identify drugs now being tested in people, a crucial milestone in turning AI's potential into reality. Already, some of these companies have demonstrated they can shorten the timeline of discovering drugs from years to months.
By Insider's tally, these eight biotechs have 31 drugs in clinical testing across a wide variety of diseases, such as cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and COVID-19. Verge Genomics is one of the eight biotechs using AI to develop better drugs, in order of how many drugs they have in human testing.
Rather than the typical process of leaning on animal studies to find the most promising drug candidate, Verge focuses on testing samples of brain tissue from actual human patients. CEO Alice Zhang calls it going from human to human, instead of animal to human. ... In the case of its first clinical candidate, VRG50635, Zhang's team first helped identify the role of a protein-coding gene called PIKfyve in ALS, a serious neurodegenerative disease. Verge then designed the first-ever drug to target this gene and began dosing ALS patients in October.