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Exscientia Receives A $4.2 Million Grant From The Gates Foundation To Develop New Medicines And Treatments For Infectious Diseases

This article is more than 3 years old.

You may not have heard about the term ‘pharmatech’ yet, but many pharmaceutical companies these days are leveraging the power of technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to discover new drugs, manufacturing processes, and clinical trials. One of those companies is Exscientia

Based in Oxford, U.K., the company designs and discovers new drugs using artificial intelligence. The company was also the first to pioneer the automation of drug design and the first one to have designed a new molecule with AI to enter into human clinical trials. They do this by using their two drug discovery platforms - Centaur Biologist® and Centaur Chemist®, both built on validated proprietary AI technology and used in-house by computational biologists and computational drug designers. 

“Drug design is a team sport. Any design we work on is always checked by a human before it is taken forward. Our drug discovery process is a collaborative one between our AI technology and our team of experienced in-house drug hunters – hence we call this process Centaur. We believe humans and AI together can form a highly productive and creative process. The fact we are now using AI to undertake something as creative as drug design is a fascinating development for the field. At Exscientia we think of ourselves as a design company, even though the things we are designing are atomic in scale. The position of every atom in a drug determines all of its future success or failure,” Denise Barrault, Senior Portfolio Manager at Exscientia, shares with me in an email. 

The reason for our conversation was the $4.2 million grant company received recently from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which will be used to identify new innovative treatments for infectious diseases (malaria and tuberculosis) as well as new medicines for family planning. The reason for this is because malaria and tuberculosis still remain the leading causes of death worldwide. Prevalence is linked to a combination of poverty, continued unmet clinical need, treatment side-effects, emerging drug resistance, and high failure rates in research and development for next-generation medicines. Family planning plays an important role in reducing maternal, infant, and child mortality. There have been significant improvements in the reproductive health of women in low resource settings, yet it is estimated that over 214 million women in developing countries still have an unmet need for modern contraception. 

Barrault, who leads the company’s program for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has an impressive career in life sciences, holds a Ph.D. in Immunology and Tropical Diseases, has worked on establishing and managing multiple large-scale academic life science and medical research projects, and has been involved in raising over $150 million for public-private research partnerships in the life sciences so far. 

The company completed a Series C funding round in May 2020, raising $70 million, with Novo Holdings joining the board of investors, alongside Bristol-Myers Squibb, Evotec, and GT Healthcare Capital Partners. “March was particularly volatile. But, given the industry we operate in, and despite public and private capital markets being affected by the pandemic, we have received significant interest from investors. Not only that, we have doubled in size as a company since the first COVID-19 lockdown in March last year,” adds Barrault. “We were founded in 2012 and currently employ around 100 people - a combination of deep tech talent, combined with drug hunting capabilities. This combination of drug discovery and engineering is reflected in our makeup – about half the company are computer engineers and half the company are drug discovery scientists. Our drug hunters are very experienced. Together they have brought around 80 molecules into the clinic and discovered three marketed drugs between them – including Viagra® (sildenafil).”

Methods the company is using are complex and include deep learning techniques, which enable them to identify new drug targets and rapidly optimize drug candidates. When deep learning is applied to this kind of integrated data it can help generate new hypotheses for identifying new drug targets for new medicine. Once they have identified the targets, Barrault’s team will work with the Gates Foundation to look to validate the targets experimentally, including developing strategies to look for drugs using Centaur platform. For those not familiar with the terminology, a drug target is a molecule in the body associated with a particular disease process, that could be addressed by a drug to produce a desired therapeutic effect. In a nutshell, drug target enables scientists to identify the biological origin of a disease.

“We are a full-stack AI drug discovery company, which means that not only do we generate our own data – with our own biology labs - but we also develop our own pipeline of drugs. The benefit of this is that it allows us to work at speed, with scale, and in therapy areas where data is much more limited. 

As someone deeply passionate about female health, I was interested to find out how can AI drug discovery help to unlock opportunities for women, particularly around non-hormonal contraceptives (NHCs). “Historically, not enough data has been collected or recorded on women’s health. The gender data gap means that women are often at a severe disadvantage when it comes to getting the treatments that they need. This is especially true when it comes to reproductive health across the globe. It is estimated that many women – especially in developing countries – still have an unmet need for modern contraception. Hormonal contraceptives aren’t suitable for all women, with some women experiencing side effects ranging from headaches to sickness, to mood swings. The availability of NHCs would be a game-changer for many women. For example, when you think about this in a more global context, currently, in developing countries family planning plays an important role in reducing maternal, infant, and child mortality. So providing more options for women will be beneficial to both them and their families,” explains Barrault. 

2020 has put AI drug discovery on the map. Whilst great work was being done in this space prior to the pandemic, recognition and understanding of its capabilities weren’t quite there yet. COVID-19 has shone a spotlight on the healthcare sector, and we’re now seeing a lot more interest in the future of AI drug discovery. It’s now recognized that AI has real potential to develop and deliver healthcare solutions faster. “One of the more interesting and steadily developing trends I’ve seen this year is the application of AI to phenomics. By this, I mean that a more holistic approach to drug discovery is taking place. Rather than looking to target a particular molecule, we’re seeing the industry looking to drug a particular disease area as a whole. AI lends itself well to this challenge.”

“We believe that by the end of this decade all drugs entering clinical trials will be designed by AI because of the huge advantages it offers in speed and efficiency,” she concludes. I would say - a very bold claim, but, following the footsteps of Exscientia, entirely possible.

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