Insilico Medicine and CBRM announce a licensing agreement

• AGING
• BIOLOGY
• BUSINESS/ECONOMICS
• CANCER
• DEATH/DYING
• GERONTOLOGY
• MEDICINE/HEALTH
• MORTALITY/LONGEVITY
• RESEARCH/DEVELOPMENT
• TECHNOLOGY/ENGINEERING/COMPUTER SCIENCE

In 2013 CBRM, a research organization headquartered in Moscow, Russia, sponsored a multi-center study, where multiple in silico predictions generated by scientists at Insilico Medicine were validated on in vitro on senescent cells and analyzed in multiple imaging and microarray experiments. A range of predictions with minimal or no side effects rescued the senescent phenotype and lead to transcriptomic signatures resembling "young" non-senescent cells. Insilico Medicine will receive the research results prior to publication in order to explore synergistic and cumulative effects of these compounds and perform further validation and compounding with the full rights to file for intellectual property and sub-license the findings.
 
The Center for Biogerontology and Regenerative Medicine is supporting multiple multi-disciplinary studies in aging and longevity, organizing industry forums and seminars for young scientists. It is dedicated to reducing Russia's dependence on natural resource-driven economy by fostering a generation of young leaders in systems biology of aging and longevity and age-related diseases. The study validating the efficacy of molecules with predicted geroprotective properties in vitro was one of the landmark research projects of CBRM.

"We are happy to see a list of several hundred molecules promising to extend life span could be narrowed down using computational approaches and tested in vitro. These results give us more confidence that transcriptional response- and signaling pathway activation scoring- based drug discovery strategies may help us repurpose existing safe natural products, drugs and drug combinations that may extend healthy longevity in humans or rejuvenate specific human tissues", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc. 

"As a former employee of Insilico Medicine, I am happy to see that predictions we made using a novel computational approach can be validated in vitro and I hope to see this work propagate into clinical or preventative medicine practice within the coming decade. CBRM will continue performing cutting-edge experimental and clinical research to extend healthy longevity. We have one of the best teams of young scientists dedicated to preventing age-related diseases and debilitating aging-related conditions", said Andrew Garazha, president of CBRM.

About the Center for Biogerontology and Regenerative Medicine (CBRM)
 
The Center for Biogerontology and Regenerative Medicine was formed as a limited company in Russia to advance research in longevity research and regenerative medicine by a group of young scientists from the Pirogov Medical University, D. Rogachev Federal Research and Clinical Center for Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and Lomonosov Moscow State University specializing in bioinformatics and medicine. CBRM is affiliated with the Skolkovo Foundation and is the resident of Biopharmcluster "Northern" at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and has close collaborations and a research agreement with the laboratory of aging and longevity.
http://biogerontology.ru/en

About Insilico Medicine, Inc
 
Insilico Medicine, Inc. is a bioinformatics company located at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore. It utilizes advances in genomics, big data analysis and deep learning for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company pursues internal drug discovery programs in cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, sarcopenia and geroprotector discovery and provides services to pharmaceutical companies. Brief company video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8

 

Pharma.AI

Pharma.AI launches to apply artificial intelligence to drug discovery and development

 Insilico Medicine, one of the leaders in advanced signaling pathway activation analysis and deep learning for aging and cancer research is proud to announce the formation of the Pharmaceutical Artificial Intelligence division focused on applying latest advances in artificial intelligence to streamline drug discovery and drug repurposing processes and significantly cutting time to market.

With the exception of cancer immunology, most of the pharmaceutical companies are facing declining returns on their R&D investments and are not open to external innovation in early stage development. Pharma.AI aims to bridge this gap by providing cutting-edge machine learning services delivered by an experienced team of bioinformatics and deep learning experts working with millions of drugs, annotated gene expression samples and blood biochemistry data sets that can be used to augment customer's data.

"Since its inception Insilico Medicine is taking the umbrella view on aging research developing biomarkers and drug candidates in a broad number of fields. We collaborate with some of the largest pharmaceutical companies, cosmetics companies and academic institutions on a number of disease- or drug-specific projects. However, our focus on aging and "we do everything" approach is confusing for many of our customers and partners and with the launch of Pharma.AI as a division, we will highlight a core part of our business and explore the possibility of spinning it off as a separate company in the future", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.

With 11 highly-expert machine learning experts worldwide, Pharma.AI team is developing deep learned transcriptomics-, proteomics-, blood biochemistry-based biomarkers of multiple diseases, predictors of alternative therapeutic uses of multiple drugs and analytical tools for high-throughput screening. Pharmaceutical companies utilizing Broad Institute's Connectivity Map or LINCS projects of pipelines will find powerful analytical drug discovery tools readily available.

"I am happy to join Pharma.AI division as a research scientist focusing on interpreting the results of our AI analytical systems in skin care applications. I am already supporting this team as a geneticist, but with a full-time appointment I have a chance to help transform the pharmaceutical industry forever. I am also happy with Insilico Medicine's mission to empower women in emerging geographies and giving us visibility and skills that will be in high demand over the next two decades when many other jobs will be lost to automation", said Polina Mamoshina, senior research scientist at Insilico Medicine.

About Insilico Medicine, Inc

Insilico Medicine, Inc. is a bioinformatics company located at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore. It utilizes advances in genomics, big data analysis and deep learning for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company pursues internal drug discovery programs in cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, sarcopenia and geroprotector discovery and provides services to pharmaceutical companies. Brief company video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8

 

Insilico Medicine launched Aging.AI

Aging.AI system allowing users to guess their age and gender by entering the results of their blood test. The system will not be used for medical purposes at this time and is focused on gamification of consumer blood testing and attracting the attention of the general public to the importance of periodic blood tests.

The renaissance in deep learning, led by the teams of Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Andrew Ng and several other thought leaders, is revolutionizing many areas of information technology in the same way that CRISPR/CAS9 is revolutionizing biomedicine. However, the propagation of deep learning into biomedicine has been slow. Since 2014, Insilico Medicine has been hard at work harmonizing millions of gene expression samples and developing deep-learned transcriptomic biomarkers of cancer, aging, and other diseases for clients worldwide, in many cases achieving performance superior to other machine learning methods. Aging.AI is not a transcriptomic marker, it is a side project of the company's collaboration with leading diagnostic centers providing fully-anonymized blood biochemistry and cell-count test data linked to age and gender of patients that are presumably free of life-threatening diseases other than aging. Almost a million samples were used to train an ensemble of deep neural networks to predict age and gender of the patient and deployed as a web-based tool, which can be used for entertainment purposes by the customers of diagnostic clinics and make blood testing more fun.

"Deep learning is revolutionizing machine vision and many other fields, but very few groups are exploring its power to extend healthy productive longevity. Aging research is the most altruistic cause resulting in the largest number of quality-adjusted life years (QALY) per dollar spent and maximizing the net present value (NPV) of human life. What social networks, software companies and banks may not understand is that their value is the equation of the NPV of each individual user and now it is possible to apply artificial intelligence expertise to extending productive longevity of the user base. We encourage experts in machine learning to work with our team to significantly accelerate progress in applied human aging research," said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine.
Some of the highlights of 2015 included the development of deep learning systems trained on the NVIDIAR DIGITS™DevBox achieving high levels of accuracy in recognizing images, translating speech, autonomous driving and several other fields.
 
Aging is a disease and our target is to find ways to treat it or even cure it. Advances in deep learning and multi-omics integration will help us find actionable markers of aging in humans and develop novel interventions to extend healthy longevity.

"The launch of Microsoft's How-Old.net, which can predict the age of the person by the photograph, inspired us to develop a consumer-friendly system to guess the patient's age by simple blood biochemistry. Our company is quite good at developing similar tissue-specific biomarkers trained on large number of transcriptomic data sets in order to predict the geroprotective efficacy of multiple anti-aging, CNS, metabolic and anti-cancer drugs. But here we stepped outside our core competence. Users may find it interesting to see if the predicted age changes after a certain diet, exercise routine or drug regimen prescribed by their physician. It will be interesting to combine this marker with Beauty.AI, RYNKL and other projects being developed to analyze age-related changes and the effectiveness of anti-aging interventions in the future. We now have many collaborations with IVF clinics and cosmetic and nutrition companies that may result in more comprehensive biomarkers of aging, longevity, attractiveness and mortality," said Polina Mamoshina, research scientist, Insilico Medicine, Inc, involved in the project.

"We hope that via machine learning, discoveries with biological and cheminformatics data in drug discovery may sprout fruit over the next few years to come. The amount of annotated genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic and other human data is reaching the levels sufficient for deep neural networks to possibly outperform other machine learning methods. These methods may be useful to move into basic classification tasks into drug repurposing, drug discovery, biomarker development and possibly even aging research," said Mark Berger, Senior Alliance Manager, Life & Material Sciences, NVIDIA Corporation. 

One of the main collaborators on the Aging.AI project is Invitro Laboratories, Inc., the largest independent diagnostic company in Eastern Europe. It offers a broad range of diagnostic services and has one of the most advanced electronic record management systems in the region.
"Blood tests can help detect problems before these problems turn into pathologies. Blood can tell a lot about the person and it is a true science turning the anonymized statistical data into life-saving interventions and to encourage people to learn about the many components of their blood. INVITRO supports many medical scientific projects, from regular students' research to breakthrough technologies of 3D-Bioprinting solutions. We also expect that our anonymized data will become a good base for Aging.AI success. We share very much the Aging.AI approach to make blood testing both educational and fun," said Alexander Ostrovskiy, Chairman of the Board of INVITRO Laboratories.

About Insilico Medicine, Inc
Insilico Medicine aims to extend healthy human longevity while minimizing animal testing and engaging in cutting-edge aging research utilizing some of the recent advances in genomics and high-performance computing. It provides analytical services to biopharmaceutical companies, repurposes existing drugs and develops molecular biomarkers of aging and age-related diseases. Headquartered at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore, it has R&D resources in Belgium, Poland, Russia and China employing 39 scientists worldwide. It is one of the leaders in artificial intelligence trained on some of the largest repositories of gene expression and pharmacological data. The company utilizes advanced signaling pathway analysis and a technique called deep learning to discover drugs that slow down or even reverse aging in various tissues. The company has over 150 research collaborators, and since 2014 the company's scientists have published over 40 research publications in peer-reviewed journals.