UK-based Exscientia and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have entered into a partnership to combine the former’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with the drug discovery and development expertise of the latter to develop new small-molecule oncology therapies.
Based on the jointly identified therapeutic targets, the precision medicine platform of Exscientia will be used by the partners for identifying new anti-cancer, cell-intrinsic small-molecule compounds.
Exscientia said that promising candidates will move on to further development with the therapeutics discovery team at MD Anderson.
According to the collaborators, successful target discovery programmes could be advanced into proof-of-concept clinical trials, which will be held at MD Anderson.
Exscientia founder and CEO Andrew Hopkins said: “We are tremendously proud to work alongside MD Anderson to harness our AI-driven platform toward the discovery of next-generation cancer treatments.
“Artificial intelligence has opened up new possibilities in cancer research, enabling us to use deep learning multi-omics within our precision medicine platform to test potential drug candidates in Exscientia’s patient tissue models.
“Further, our platform holds the potential to stratify patients even in the early discovery stage, allowing us to efficiently design drug candidates that are most likely to be impactful for people with cancer.”
Exscientia will work together with the team at Institute for Applied Cancer Science (IACS), which is a key component of MD Anderson’s therapeutics discovery unit. IACS is a drug discovery institute which is engaged in developing novel small-molecule therapeutics.
MD Anderson therapeutics discovery vice president and IACS head Philip Jones said: “We are driven to develop the next generation of oncology treatments that can offer meaningful benefits and improve the lives of our patients.
“This collaboration is built upon Exscientia’s AI-driven precision medicine platform, the strength of MD Anderson’s drug discovery and development engine, and the expertise of our clinical research teams. Our ultimate goal is to decrease the time we spend in drug development and accelerate novel targeted therapies into the clinic.”
In March this year, Exscientia announced a collaboration with the University of Oxford Target Discovery Institute for developing novel medicines for unmet medical needs.
